Category: Best Retirement Towns and States
June 22, 2016 -- Most everybody has a drop dead requirement for their best place to retire. For book lovers, that can mean living in a town where there is an interesting bookstore. Sure you can buy books online at Amazon, but for many there is no substitute for being able to settle down in a comfy store where the staff knows their books, and the selections carefully vetted. In this article Lucy Burdette and her best-selling writer friends at JungleRedWriters.com review their favorite bookstore towns. As writers touring the country to give book talks and signings, they know book shops!
As we hoped, most of these towns are great places to retire - and not just because of their wonderful bookstores. The kind of town that cultivates and supports a good book shop is a place that has many other things going on too - good restaurants, shops, cultural events, interesting
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Published on June 21, 2016
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Category: Active adult communities
June 16, 2016 -- We've been wresting with a question about active adult and 55+ communities. The question is: does one side of the of the USA have a better range, selection, and type of active and 55+ communities than the other? Does the East (from Maine to Florida and west to Wisconsin and Louisiana) offer more, or is the Western half of the country (from Kansas to Hawaii and parts North and South) the one with more interesting active adult possibilities? The obvious answer finally came to us - ask our Topretirements Members - you have a range of collective experience that is incredibly valuable! So we are asking you at the end of this article to share your point of view about the areas that provide the best options for active adult living.
Part of the reason we ask comes from the challenge we continually face in adding new active adult and 55+ communities to our database. Although it usually easy to find a community we haven't yet reviewed in the Eastern part of the US on any given day, it is much harder to discover new or existing ones from the West. Which leads us to believe that perhaps the fence is much greener if you decide to retire somewhere in the East. But perhaps it is, as several frustrated
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Published on June 14, 2016
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Category: Health and Wellness Issues
June 12, 2016 -- All over the country there is a craze raging with a very funny name - pickleball. You have probably heard about it, maybe because it is very popular in active adult and retirement communities. But the question is, should it be your next sport? This article will talk about the sport and help you determine whether you should give it a “whack”.
Pickleball got started in 1965 on a modified badminton court. Kids in gym class sometimes play it because it can be played indoors in a fairly limited space with minimum equipment. Since then it has expanded around the globe, but has really taken off as an activity in 55+ and active adult communities.
What is it the game and how is it played
Pickleball is played on a court that is roughly half the size
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Published on June 11, 2016
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Category: Health and Wellness Issues
June 8, 2016 -- Congrats on your retirement, you earned it! Unfortunately a happy retirement doesn't happen automatically - a lot depends on how staying young and maximizing your happiness every day. This article will share the best research we've seen to help you to live longer and get the most out of every moment of retirement.
To write this article we have taken a "Best of the Best" approach. To do that we assembled a list of great articles from around the web on the "secrets" and "mistakes" surrounding retirement. From each one we have picked out what we think is the most important tip or two. The result is
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Published on June 7, 2016
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Category: Best Retirement Towns and States
June 1, 2016 -- Easy walkability to town, parks and lakes, and shopping were top considerations for retirement living when we surveyed our members 3 years ago. To help you find places that meet that criteria we have identified 10 Florida towns where it is easy and a joy to walk around in.
Some people's vision of a Sunshine State retirement conjures up a bleak landscape of strip malls and busy highways. The reality is that Florida also has some of the most livable towns in America. Towns where you can live downtown or close to it, and walk to everything that is important to you, day or night. In fact, in most of these Florida towns the walking is so good that you could even survive without a car.
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Published on June 1, 2016
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Category: Financial and taxes in retirement
May 25, 2016 -- We've seen a flurry of studies articles over the past few months that suggest that empty nesters aren't doing a good enough job of saving. It seems like once the kids and the costs associated with them are gone, most people spend the extra money instead of save it. The overall findings are troubling, since so many people are expected to have a very hard time maintaining their pre-retirement lifestyles. We just hope you are among the folks who have saved enough!
Here are some of the articles and links:
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Published on May 24, 2016
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Category: Best Retirement Towns and States
May 24, 2016 -- Does the idea of retiring to a small town seem nice, but just a little too confining? Or do the bright city lights get you excited - until you realize the urban pace might be too big, too intense, too congested, too expensive for a retirement lifestyle? If you are torn between the two, perhaps you should consider a small city, where you can experience the best of both worlds - retirement on a smaller, more livable scale, along with plenty of excitement, restaurants, and happenings to enjoy.
To produce this article we searched for smaller cities that are perfect for retirement. We tried to avoid places that get mentioned over and over again, or that are more popular as tourist destinations than as a place to live in retirement. Our criteria were relatively simple:
- City population between 100,000 - 250,000 (our definition, and hard to measure precisely)
- A distinct city center that is bustling day and night
- Advantage given to towns located in the Sunbelt or slightly warmer climates, since most retirees have that preference
- Not prohibitively expensive
11 Great Small Cities for Retirement
Here is what we came up with, using popularity figures
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Published on May 23, 2016
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Category: Health and Wellness Issues
May 17, 2016 — We have just updated Part I of our “So You Are Turning 65: Medicare and You 101” article. The revisions include up to date premium and deductible numbers for 2016, among other improvements. There had been a flurry of recent Comments made to this article…
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Published on May 17, 2016
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Category: Adventurous retirement
“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.”
Lao Tzu, philosopher.
By Peter and Sally
Our friends Peter and Sally have a zest for life that is evidenced in the choices they have made over their adult life and into retirement. They also seem to move a lot. We appreciate that they were kind enough to share that history with Topretirements. They have ended up (so far!) in a very cool, extremely tiny incorporated city below Palm Beach. Our hope is that you will find their saga interesting as well as instructive.
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May 15, 2016 -- We have many friends who have spent their entire married life in one home. It didn’t turn out that way for us. It’s not like we planned it or anything, it was just that the grass always looked greener somewhere up or down or across the road. Circumstances also change. Here is our tale of where we lived from newly married to several iterations of retirement.
1978, Hartford Connecticut – A cool condo! One of the first in the city. Historic rehab, 3 levels, exposed brick. Walk to work with all the other hip, young professionals. Perfect.
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But … shlepping groceries
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Published on May 14, 2016
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Category: Retirement Real Estate
May 11, 2016 -- Is your real estate experience something you are pleased with, or a subject best left untouched? A new interactive tool published in the Washington Post will confirm that for you in just a few seconds. Enter your zip code or town, and voila!, it will show you how much the value of your home has changed since 2004.
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Published on May 10, 2016
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