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The Two Life-Changing Decisions of Aging Boomers

Retiring can be an exceptionally liberating and empowering event for older boomers. Where they live is no longer dictated by where they work. Without these locational shackles, they can relocate to a new community that better matches how they want to spend their retirement years.

To help these deliberations, "best place to retire" studies offer a ready source of guidance. These typically rank communities (towns, cities, suburbs) or states/provinces by how well they measure up on various quality-of-life indicators. They all hope to "rekindle your love of life."

Indicators examined vary but typically include a place's affordability (housing, overall cost of living), crime rates, access to good health and long-term care, weather conditions, availability of leisure, recreational and educational activities, and part-time employment or volunteer opportunities.

Why Place Rankings are Useful

These rankings can help retirees decide how positively or negatively they feel about a potential retirement destination's quality of life. In psychological parlance, they gauge the "valence" of their feelings. For example, most retirees have negative feelings about moving to places with higher crime rates but positive feelings about places with a lower cost of living.

However, it is not just the valence of their feelings about a place—positive or negative—that matters.

Retirees care more about some aspects of their future abode than others. These features have greater psychological importance or salience and weigh more heavily in their moving deliberations. So, many would regard having easy access to healthcare facilities as more essential for ensuring the quality of their lives than favorable leisure or recreational offerings.

"Best place to retire" studies fall short because they are silent on this salience question. By default, they assign equal importance to all their indicators. However, retirees comprise a diverse group of individuals, and their quality-of-life priorities vary. Consider the residential reasoning of the following retiree.

Jennifer just retired from a nursing career. Recently divorced, she searches for a new place of residence to "restart" her life. High on her list of priorities is to feel confident that she has help dealing with any health and physical mobility problems that might arise later in her life.

Why this emphasis? Her recently deceased mother had Alzheimer's disease. She vividly remembers the demands and stressful experiences she experienced as her caregiver. She wants assurances that she will have the necessary help if she becomes physically or mentally frail.

She picks a place to retire with stressfully high housing costs, ugly winter weather, and inadequate public transit. What is going on with Jennifer? Given the negative valence of her feelings about living in this community, did she make a flawed residential decision?

Not in the least!

Her selected destination has one highly salient and favorable attribute. By moving here, she is geographically close to her loving adult daughter, who she is confident will be there for her if she has difficulty living independently. Jennifer's daughter also has friends who are also willing to offer a helping hand. Consequently, it matters relatively little to Jennifer that the retirement guides poorly rank so many aspects of this place's quality of life.

Deliberating on the Best Place to Retire

So, when judging the quality of life of potential destinations, it will be prudent for retirees to address two questions:

What positively evaluated features of a retirement location are most essential or salient to my future well-being? These matter the most to me, and I cannot live without them. It may be a community with a big city flavor with diverse shopping and educational opportunities or one with a rural way of life close to nature. Alternatively, it must have warm year-round weather and outdoor leisure activities. Jennifer felt it essential to be geographically close to her adult daughter.
What aspects of a potential retirement location are deal breakers? I will never live in a place with these features, even if surveys rank them favorably. It might be located too far away from family members or contain a population with objectionable political views or religious beliefs. It may have undesirable extreme weather events (such as wildfires, hurricanes, tornadoes, flooding, or high summer temperatures).

Make no mistake. Clear-cut decisions on the best place to live may not quickly emerge. Retirees often have to make difficult tradeoffs in their search for paradise: giving up on places with good qualities because of their more salient downsides and considering places with some bad attributes because of the salience of their excellent features.

What Matters the Most

Retirees will find no shortage of information that ranks places (states/provinces and communities) to retire based on how they measure up on various quality-of-life indicators. However, what is left for them to decide is far more challenging—what quality-of-life features matter the most?

If retirees prudently think ahead—which is sometimes not easy to do—they will recognize that two sets of place qualities come into play.

The first set focuses on the here and now and is far easier to contemplate:

What features of a place make it possible for them to enjoy their active and healthy retirement years optimally?

But the second set of issues—dealing with the future—is much more complicated to evaluate. Suppose they confront health problems and mobility limitations. In that case, it might be prudent to prioritize living where they can secure the necessary caregiving assistance and services, enabling them to live as independently as possible. Keep Jennifer in mind!

So much is at stake, and retirees do not want to have second thoughts after settling in a new locale.

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About the Author

Stephen M. Golant, Ph.D., is a leading national speaker, author, and researcher on the housing, mobility, transportation, and long-term care needs of older adult populations. He is a Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America, a Fulbright Senior Scholar award recipient, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Florida. Golant’s latest book is Aging in The Right Place, published by Health Professions Press. Contact him at golant@ufl.edu

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