You're a realist.

I know exactly where you are. You're pretty close to me, and I ride in that area all the time. Your town has among the highest taxes in the region, if not the highest of all. Town of Colonie, where I live, seems to have the lowest around. I grew up in this town, but property taxes were a major consideration when I decided to move back to the area. It seems the reason for the differences in tax rates between Niskayuna and Colonie is that your town discourages retail and other types of commercial development. The revenue from local businesses takes some of the tax burden off of the homeowners over here.

Since I am in realist mode, I here are two things I have noticed watching the retired and/or elderly:

1. In a town without very good public transportation, when you can no longer drive, your world collapses in. Getting to grocery stores and medical appoinments gets to be an ordeal. Having great theater and resturants and a bus system that shuts down at 6:00 PM is not all that different from not having great theater or restaurants. The lsit goes on and on.
2. Gentlemen, when you die, the chance that your wife is going to move closer to the kid(s) is somewhere between 100% and 110%. That's a low estimate. :)

Those two factors explain about 95% of the empty dream houses my parents use to point out to me when we drove around New Bern. "There's the Jones's house. He has 1600 sq foot workshop, he was quite a woodworker. When he couldn't drive anymore, they had to move back up north. That's the Smith's house - they loved that boat. She took quite a loss when she had to sell it after he passed. I think their house has been on the market for 3 years, ever since she moved back to Connecticut to b closer to he daughter..."

My big hope is that at least one of my kids is living in a college town when we are retired - from what I can tell, the only public transportation systems that run after dark in non-metropolitan areas in the US are in college towns.

One other dismal note :) - a big part of the medical question has to do with auxiliary services. There are a number of towns in my home state where the local hospital is top notch, but the available medical rehab facilities look like something out of a Dickensian pauper's prison. If you can, try to investigate all tiers of health service!

This is such a great thread.
I live in Antioch, CA, a distant suburb of San Francisco. It's awful. I love my job and my house. The weather is hot, but that means winters are warmish, which is great, But the community is the worst. The city planning is anti-cycling, crime is going up too fast, teh streets are covered with broken glass and teh drivers all think their SUVs are the only important vehicles on the road.

Everywhere I'd like to retire is too expensive. I'd love Berkeley, near the university, music, art and theater.
I think I'd like Ashland Oregon, home of the Shakespeare fest. Portland has more rain than I need, but otherwise is grand.

Where can I escape conservative politics, find art and music, enjoy the California-style weather I love and still be able to afford housing?

I have a list of places I know aren't for me: Texas, anywhere in the south, or anywhere that I'd have to shovel snow.

Maybe a small college town within a reasonable drive to an actual city... Sugestions?

Me??? I want to retire in the Appalachian mountains near Butler, TN. Watauga Lake? Gorgeous! No state tax in TN. 20 miles away is Boone, NC which is also awesomely pretty. Don't know how NC taxes compare to TN though.

Prescott Arizona or thereabouts for me.

More likely is somewhere in the mountains where the temp's are moderate all year round.

Barcelona, Spain. Maybe, if you want a smaller college town, Siena, Italy. Both are on my list, if I do decide to move. Both wonderful places to live.

Years ago I had a friend from CT who went to college in FL. He got married and settled in FL. He used to rail about the cost of living in CT and took every opportunity to tell people that's why he would never move back to CT. Then he had a child with special needs. He immediately moved back to CT because his kid could get the services he needed. Sounds to me like there's a lot of retired folks thinking the same way.

What a wild idea. It would be interesting to see what it would be like to live in Spain without speaking Spanish. I know I'd love to visit either city (or better yet, both)
But that is a long way from family... I don't think my wife would buy having her (currently just one) grandchildren in a different country.

It is kinda nice living close to grandkids.

Yeah, I know. That was my point earlier, one's life is about people, not just places.
But don't dismiss it altogether. You'd pick up enough Spanish, or Italian, ina few months. Barcelona is a wonderful city with a convivial and quite sophisticated atmosphere. Siena, and Tuscany in general, is irresistible - especially for those like you who are interested in both cycling and the arts. In fact, I may just have talked myself into it. LOL.

Certainly visit. These are both places one should see, even if one doesn't intend to move there.

Why did nobody mention Victoria BC?

I flirt with that idea from time to time, but I suspect I will probably stay just where I am, humid summers, cold winters and all.

I think what you are suggesting is a decision matrix. That's part of the process.

Totally - but if your kids are spread all over the country/world, it's not really possible.

Every time this thread pops up I'm always fascinated by the answers.

Why does someone spend most of their adult lives, prior to "retirement" in a place they hate?

Was their a boat anchor tied to their butt? Sheeple syndrome?

For me, I have a great job I can bike commue to. Finding another job teaching what I love at a college would be pretty hard to come by. And it wasn't always so awful here. It was never great, but it tanked during the housing boom and got worse after. So I tough it out, enjoy the weather, and the fact I can get to San Francisco and Berkeley in a bit over an hour. But to retire here? I'd move if I could do it reasonably.

IMHO even Colonie tax rates are excessive compared to where I lived in Virgina - when I moved here 12 years ago even moving to Colonie would raise my prperty taxes by 4X on the same value house, not to mention doubling sales tax and incom tax. I love where I live, but I don't want to hand over the local county a new custom made CF bike with super record group every year.

Good question. I like the place I'm living now. As I get older I like warmer weather, and as my income will no longer be indefinite, the tax burden becomes more important. Also, up tp now all the family lives here, but that will change over the next year. I don't like that, but that's the way it is.

How so? I've been vacationing in the Wilmington area for 20 years, and I've not seen any obvious changes. As for the dream houses, a lot of vacation homes went up for sale when the national economy tanked.

Sometimes there just aren't any viable alternatives. :(

+1 on this. When we married, we made a decision about where we wanted to live. We moved to that area and found jobs, finished school, built careers, raised our kids, built a social network, etc. I'm a handful of miles from a world class city that I’ve come to know and enjoy, and we're both less than 130 miles from the places of our birth. We can be in the mountains in less than 1.5 hours or on a beach in about an hour. There are miles of rolling Amish farmlands less than 40 minutes away. We hope to travel and spend more time doing so. We've never enjoyed "high class, luxury" travel. Rather, we've liked seeing and being in places as if we were living there... you know, get the feel of the real culture. A co-worker that I like and respect a great deal retired to Leiden in the Netherlands and loves it. We rented his home for three weeks while he was traveling, and I can see why he likes so much. Almost everyone speaks English, it is a very cycling friendly place, winters are relatively mild, etc. I suspect we’ll attempt to do other travel in this manner. It would take some major shifts in our current situation to trigger a desire to be somewhere other than home.
My younger brother retired to Ashville NC, but he and his wife only stayed one year. It was just too much of a culture shift for them. My parents retired to Florida for two years, but then moved back to their original home in central Pennsylvania. They missed their network of friends and the great winters didn't compensate for the unbearable heat in the summer. A high school buddy retired to Billings Montana and loves it there.... except the winter. So, I guess I feel somewhat fortunate that I’m living where I want to be living.

... on the road.. go bike touring..

This is part of my plan. I'm not ready to become a cycling tourist without a home, but I could spend 12 weeks a year touring. My retirement location allows touring nine months of the year. Touring is easier in Europe with bike friendly trains and passenger ferries to help support long distance and international travel.

Cycling touring is both an economical and a very intimate way to visit a new region of the world.

I don't hate where I live. After I retire there may be places that will fit my retired lifestyle better than my working lifestyle.

'cause most of us chatting about this topic are Yankees and Victoria is in the Commonwealth. As mentioned earlier, unless one is independently wealthy, they don't want you. At least on a permanent basis. I know because I've been checking.

No doubt, but I was comparing apples to apples, i.e., bordering townships, not communities separated by 500 miles.

If you want to talk taxes, you can experience negative tax rates by moving to Alaska. Utopia doesn't exist. There will always be compromises. As a matter of fact, Utopia literally means "no-place".

Boulder, Colorado (not inexpensive, though)
Lawrence, Kansas (great town, 45 minutes to Kansas City...I don't love the weather, though)
Iowa City, Iowa (tough winters, 3 hour drive to Chicago)
Madison, Wisc. (not exactly California weather)
San Luis Obispo
Davis, Calif.

The empty retirement dream houses I was referring to were on the market long before 2008 - my dad passed in 2000. The experiences I had driving around looking at big empty dream houses were in the 90s.

By "race to the bottom", I mean that eastern NC by and large had abandoned the effort to build a skilled educated work force. It seems to be a spiral - "reduce the cost of doing business" with big tax incentives, lax environmental regulation (hog waste lagoons the size of lakes, dump whatever you want in the water), and very low wages. The tax incentives are paid for by cutting spending on education, which means a less skilled work force, so you have to offer bigger incentives, even more lax regulation.

As a retiree, why do you care?

When you 1st move to a town where the only non-government jobs in town pay minimum wage, it looks great. The services you buy can be very cheap. After a while, you begin to realize that when the best jobs in town pay minimum wage, anyone with the skills and motivation t make more than minimum wage moves to a place where there are non-minimum wage jobs. :)

Since Wilmington has UNC-W, you may be somewhat insulated from that effect. College towns have disproportinately large numbers of skilled, motivated workers who are willing to work for minimum wage - at least during the vacation season. :)

YMMV

Grand Junction, CO

(They don't even own snowplows)

My brother lives in GC. It has its good and bad points. It gets pretty dang hot and dusty in the summer with a persistent desiccating wind. In spring there are lots of biting gnats which are annoying. Winter can be cold but not extreme at all. The desert is nearby so it's easy to get warmer or head to the mountains for skiing. Mtbing is great, road riding is very good, though local choices can be limited. There are only so many roads.

If I ever move there I'm buying a raft and cruising the rivers on long trips. Love river trips and GC is a great jumping off point.

I'd have to get out of town in the summer. My brother has a cabin up at Dallas Divide which is a perfect location to spend the hot months.

Asheville has really grown. I couldn't live there but it is only 45-60 min drive away to the east. My town is a small college town but the expanding University is making traffic a mess. Our weather is very moderate but skiing is only so so and very dependent on winter temps. This last year it was so warm I don't think it was much of a season. Biking is excellent though difficult. Mtbing is also great though some short drives are required to get to a trail. Hiking is great also. We have lakes too though I don't have a power boat, I often think I should.

Medical care is very good. Asheville has a couple of excellent hospitals and our town has a local hospital with a good reputation. There are always festivals and craft fairs here and the arts are supported. But the summers are trending hotter lately and the humidity can get up there. Often the air quality will suffer especially at elevation during hot dry summer periods due to the coal plants to the W/NW. I use AC here at the house starting about mid June through Aug mostly to dehumidify. We do get 50" of rain a year though it comes in big bunches.

We get a huge influx of summer residents from Fla. Our county can triple in population from late April- Oct. It is also a vacation destination so the summers can be busy though there are always places to go that are nice and quiet. Road riding is always great.