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Originally Posted by cdcox
If you read the description, that open space doesn't appear to be counted in the air conditioned space. Kind of a weird space with limited utility/value.
I've been casually thinking about retirement locations the last few years. The trade offs are really challenging. Even though my priorities are different than yours, I still am hoping your top 20 will reveal some hidden gem I had not previously considered.
My key trade offs are:
Beach front vs walkable community with culture. I really don't want to have tons of time on my hands being isolated in suburbia or a rural area.
Cool location (beach front or walkable/culture) vs. Living space. My wife has an art studio now, but wants to expand rather than contract it in the future. Can't really afford to have a large living space in a cool location.
I'm more willing to put up with miserable summers than any kind of winter whatsoever. I an either find shade and not move or go inside and soak up the AC.
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What do you think that space is for? I actually wondered a little bit if the building is a converted funeral home or something where the hearse came in through that space. But the location is clearly in a residential area, and the house looks pretty residential on the inside. So I think it's just a really weird home design. Maybe there's some specific Mississippi thing that I don't know about, but I have a hunch that maybe the home was custom built and some person had a hobby that specifically required that space.
On your tradeoffs, that's very interesting, because this started out purely as a financial exercise. I built a financial model because I was pondering how long I would have to work to replace my income (not counting our Sandbox millions at some point). Once I built that model out, it evolved to how I would handle IRA strategies and stuff to optimize finances, and that led to thinking about relocating to free up home equity. From there, I started building in the various factors of relocation such as cost of living and taxes and stuff.
One thing that I don't have in the model is some of the lifestyle stuff you're talking about, like beaches and walkability. In part, this is because those attributes are going to vary from house to house within a location to some extent, and I figured retirement is still far enough off that it wouldn't be productive to look for specific sample houses with those features. So I kind of built it in implicitly by just picking general locations that I thought were candidates based on the lifestyle we want. But there are some general differences in the cities on my list, so I've pondered adding some qualitative factor to the model about that. It might change the rankings a bit, but in part the cities are on my list because I think they might be acceptable places to live, so maybe it doesn't matter.
For us in the end, the two big factors are affordability (on my end, how many more years I need to work to move there) and climate (for my wife). Once we find a place that checks those boxes, then I'm trusting that we can find a nice walkable neighborhood and/or a place with nice aesthetics.
The living space tradeoff is kind of built into the model with my housing grade, but to my own tastes. My wife says she'd be fine cutting down our living space a lot to live in a great place with a nice climate. I'm much less interested in doing that. We have a lot of space right now, and while I could downsize a bit, I think we'd be uncomfortable living in half our current space. So I'm generally downgrading a city on housing stock if I can't get 2,000 square feet for my budget, which I think would still be comfortable. I'm not interested in maximizing living space, though, because that usually entail living in an uninteresting place and paying for more space than I need.
One weakness in my model is the sample house selection. I'm generally targeting houses in the $400k to $500k range, just to be consistent. However, there are some places (particularly some that are still coming up on the list) where I could probably meet my goals with a cheaper house. That would pull the score of those places up since it would help affordability. I kept a consistent price range partly for convenience, and partly because I can account for it a bit in the housing stock grade.
As for the climate, one reason that I started doing this is that my wife and I have both had bad falls on ice in the past couple of years, and my wife is kind of done with winter. She actively dislikes it, and she really likes warm weather. I actually don't have an issue with cold winters (well, other than falling on ice) and would prefer a cold winter over a hot and humid summer. So part of this exercise is looking at different climates and learning what the options are. I may be overweighting climate a bit in my scoring, but honestly climate is one of the two big reasons that we'd consider relocating in retirement.