[Buehler445]

Originally Posted by Rain Man

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.

Not that you asked for it or even want it, but here's my opinion on it.

Be careful writing off humidity if you intend to do outside stuff in retirement. As we age, some of us struggle with heat more. Heat is generally a stress and as we age and our bodies break down, it becomes important to reduce stress on our bodies. Humidity amplifies that greatly, because as we sweat, it doesn't evaporate and cool the body down as intended. Accordingly your body has to sit in the heat and stress. Accordingly, people choose to retire in low-humidity environments. Arthritis is also a factor, so people choose to get out of the midwest so the climate variability is lower.

Maybe I'm sensitive to it because I hate heat anyway, but there would have to be tremendous overriding factors that would lead to moving to an environment with humidity.

RE: Housing.
I wouldn't put a blanket square footage number on it, so much factors into the design and usefulness of the space that just a numerical cutoff doesn't really tell much. I would lean towards open flooplans, wide accesses (ADA approved), and as few of stairs as possible. Also limit the number of bathrooms/bedrooms, since you probably won't have a bunch of people staying. That can contrast greatly with a lot of big houses around. The other thing with big houses is you have to clean them. I mean you can have a maid or whatever, but you still have to manage the property. I would look for a smaller more functional footprint. For instance, I'd happily give up a 12X12 3rd bedroom for another 10 Sq ft in the master bathroom.