Category: Retirement Real Estate
September 16, 2011 -- The good news is that you have been out looking at active adult or 55+ communities. Scoping out different communities, their homes, and the amenities is an important step in the process of finding your best place to retire. But the bad news is that unless you have a good system for evaluating what you are seeing and learning, or if you don't rate the communities when they are fresh in your mind, they are all going to blend together as time goes on. Which leads us to today's article, how to develop an easy-to-use and reliable system for evaluating active adult communities. Note that
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Published on September 16, 2011
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Category: Best Retirement Towns and States
September 14, 2011 -- If you are like most people, affordability is a big part of the equation in finding your best place to retire. We certainly get enough requests from our members asking for help finding them. But we also know there are other aspects to choosing your retirement location - you are too discriminating to settle for some place just because it's cheap. So with that in mind we created this list of places to retire that are not only affordable, but have enough going for them that you might actually enjoy living there. This is part I from towns starting A-L. Here is a link to Part 2, Affordable Towns M-Z. We also updated this series in 2012, see "More Great Affordable Places to Retire".
The selection factors we used to develop this list:
- Affordability. Median home price in the community should be at least 25% less than the U.S. median of $171,900 (2nd quarter 2011, National Association of Realtors), or $130,000.
- Lower taxes for retirees. We did not consider any of the states on our "Worst Tax States for Retirees" list.
- High culture. To avoid you getting stuck
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Published on September 13, 2011
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Category: Best Retirement Towns and States
September 6, 2011 – It’s pretty well known that some states are definitely harder on retirees than others when it comes to taxes. So we confess that when we set out to research this article on the worst retirement states for taxes, we had some pretty strong preconceptions. Most of the worst tax states would be in the Northeast, we assumed, with perhaps California thrown in for a little geographical balance. Boy were we wrong - all but 3 of the states on our list are west of the Mississippi.
First, a few caveats about our list of worst tax states for retirement. It is easy to generalize about taxes, but that would be a huge mistake. The more we analyzed the topic, the more complicated it got. To begin with, there are many different kinds of taxes: income, sales tax, property taxes (at the state and local level), inheritance, estate, and incidental taxes like those on cigarettes and gasoline. Depending on individual situations, one type of tax will have a larger
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Published on September 6, 2011
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Category: General Retirement Issues
September 3, 2011 -- Many of us who live in along the East Coast north of South Carolina are still trying to dig out from the ravages of Hurricane Irene. For Topretirements, based on the Connecticut Shoreline, one important step arrived this afternoon, 7 days after the storm - electricity! Internet and cable TV were welcomed back at the same time. We empathize with those who lost their homes, suffered storm damage, were injured, or who still remain without power. We hope your life returns to normal soon.
Those of us in retirement face slightly different challenges in the aftermath of a natural disaster like a hurricane. We don't have
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Published on September 3, 2011
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Category: Adventurous retirement
A New, Rewarding Life
By Tom (“T. L.”) Linskey with questions from Topretirements
At first, it didn’t sink in. Even though Harriet and I were sailing our new 46-foot sailboat, Hands Across the Sea, a Dolphin 460 catamaran, on the Rio Paragaucu in northeastern Brazil, it hadn’t sunk in that we’d made it—that we’d successfully made the leap from the working life to retirement life.
In the space of a single year back in 2007 we’d wrapped up our careers, sold our home in Massachusetts, stored our possessions, sold our cars, found a home for our cat, worked with our Brazilian boatbuilder to customize our new boat, and bought a boatload of equipment from solar panels to a watermaker, to go with it. It felt like a miracle how quickly the trappings of suburbia—home insurance, property taxes, traffic, mowing the lawn, blizzards, consumerism, the roar of media, the neighbors’ barking dogs at midnight—fell away astern. We were just as astonished by what was ahead—a second life with an open horizon, promising equal measures of freedom and
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Published on August 23, 2011
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Category: Active adult communities
August 19, 2011 -- You are in the active adult community's sales office, pen in hand and ready to sign. You've toured multiple active communities and you just know this is the one. The unit you've fallen for is just being framed now; there is still time to put some custom touches in, like built-ins for the room you would rather have as an office than bedroom. All the amenities are right, and so is the price. This could just the moment when panic might set in - "why am I buying a new unit in this new community when right down the road I could pick up a comparable unit (albeit with a few miles on it) in a community that's been around for 10 years or so." A similar, but less complex conundrum is whether to buy new or used in the same community.
This article will explore the former question- are you better off buying a home in a new development or
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Published on August 20, 2011
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Category: Adventurous retirement
August 17, 2011 -- If exploring charming villages or savoring the beautiful countryside appeals to you, one of the best ways to experience these pleasures is… on a bike. Your Topretirements editor and wife Roberta are just back from a wonderful biking trip along the Danube in Hungary and Slovakia. Although there a quite a few choices in biking tours, including a self-tour, we chose VBT for ours. Some other choices include the more expensive Butterfield and Robinson, Euro-bike, and Backroads.
Whether you are retired already or just thinking about it, bike trips or other active tours are a great way to explore new territory and relax. This short article will give you an idea of what the experience is like in case you are considering one. For those to whom cycling seems a bit too adventurous, there are also walking tours, wine and food tasting tours, and barge tours. For those who crave more excitement there are options like kayaking, fishing, backpacking, and float trips.The beauty of using a tour company vs. a self-guided tour is that
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Published on August 17, 2011
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Category: Active adult communities
August 16, 2011 -- As a followup to last week's article on the "10 Worst Retirement Mistakes", our faithful member OldNassau just brought an incredibly interesting article to our attention. "Toby is Moving to Tidelands Condominiums: Anatomy of a Real Estate Decision" outlines the detailed reasons why Toby, a realtor in the Palm Coast (FL) area, recently downsized and purchased a short-sale condominium in Tidelands there. We think you will find it useful, particularly
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Published on August 16, 2011
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Category: General Retirement Issues
Updated July, 2023 - Originally published August 6, 2011 -- (Note: This is a 3 part series. See links to Parts 2 and 3 in the "Further Reading" section at end).
The most beautiful thing about retirement is that is the perfect moment to reinvent yourself. The kids are grown, your mortgage might be paid, your fight up the career ladder is behind you. It's a "do-over", now you are free to do anything you want to, an amazing opportunity! You are only limited by your imagination and your resources (and the former can help with the latter).
To help you maximize this unique chance to start life all over again, here is our list of the 10 worst retirement mistakes you can make. We hope you will keep them in mind so that your reinvention comes off without a hitch. And if you have your own mistakes or success strategies to add, please let us know in the Comments section.
Worst Retirement Mistakes
1. Start planning your retirement the day after you retire. That's too late. Smart
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Published on August 6, 2011
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Category: Active adult communities
August 2, 2011 -- Note: We updated this list in 2012 and 2013. See "Surprises Galore: Our 2013 List of Most Popular Active Adult Communities". The Sun Belt and Delaware are where it's at when it comes to popular active adult communities. That's what we found in our new list of the most popular active adult communities for 2011. The only places outside of the sun belt to have communities on the list were Delaware which had 12 communities on the top 100 this year (up from 5 in 2010); The Village at Penn State in State College, PA.; and Sage Village in Boulder, CO. In an attempt to open it up and introduce more variety this year, we increased the list from 50 to 100. As in the past, the Sun Belt achieved near total domination over its colder brethren.
Florida, the runaway favorite, topped the 2011 list with an astonishing 40 communities. Arizona followed Delaware with 11 communities, and then North Carolina, which had with 10. South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia also had good representation.
We take several conclusions away from these results:
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Published on August 1, 2011
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