The Smart Take:
We want it all in life and for our retirement. We want the city where we live to have it too — affordability, a plethora of activities, fantastic quality of life, and great healthcare. Learn the 10 best cities as ranked by Wallethub.com and what makes them great. Some may even surprise you. Tune in and start envisioning where you want to be in retirement and plan for how to get there.
Prefer to read? See below for the transcript of the show.
Wallethub Article: https://wallethub.com/edu/best-places-to-retire/6165/?fbclid=IwAR2ZvsUK1mW06MMlHootGpCS_2QJGllrLSgaa6NDKVlKdBoQNjBEIRiI31Y
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The Host:
Kevin Kroskey – About – Contact
Intro: Welcome to Retire Smarter with Kevin Kroskey. Find answers to your toughest questions and get educated about the financial world. It’s time to Retire Smarter.
Walter Storholt: You’re back with us for another great edition of Retire Smarter. I’m Walter Storholt alongside Kevin Kroskey, president and wealth advisor at true wealth design. Ready for another great episode today. Kevin, how are you?
Kevin : I’m doing great, Walter. We’re kind of working our way through fall and getting into, at least in Northeast Ohio, the chillier part of the year. And so, in light of that, I thought we’d talk about some retirement places, places where people buy a second home or sell their home here in Northeast Ohio and move to and which is typically somewhere warmer. Not always, but.
Walter Storholt: Your mind is already shifting toward Florida. I can hear it.
Kevin: Well, I’m bald too, and I hear that 70% of your heat escapes through your head. So a bald man always has to have a hat, which I have many. But when you go down to Florida it’s a lot better for a bald man and for a lot of people in general. Certainly, some people don’t like it or have different likes. But I came across an article recently on Wallet Hub that we will link to in the show notes and it was a pretty good study about some different best places to retire. They had a lot of different criteria and rankings, and I thought it was interesting and kind of set the stage a little bit for this conversation and some others related to retirement living, retirement housing, and things along those lines. And we’ll talk about in future episodes.
Walter Storholt: And this one’s actually got some like decent data behind it. I feel like a lot of the times these articles come out and it’s like what was the methodology that went behind? Like we asked a hundred people where their favorite place to X, Y, Z was, and now this city is the fastest. We think this city is the place to go if you’re single and under between the ages of 25 and 27. It’s like just kind of go with these random conclusions.
Walter Storholt: But this one actually goes in pretty good depth, has a couple of different ways that they did the ranking and has some different data and things that they pulled out of the study. So I feel like this one has a lot more meat to it than most studies. So we’ll put a link to this, by the way, in the description of today’s episode. So check your show notes on whatever app you’re using or if you’re on truewealthdesign.com you can find the link to the article there as well. And if you want to kind of follow along with some of the findings or peek at it while you listen, certainly go for it. Go ahead and do that. That’d be great. [crosstalk 00:02:35] But yeah, go ahead.
Kevin: me by now and our listeners know by now that, if we like detail, we like evidence, we like rigor. This is like right up our alley. So I agree. You see these ones where it’s like, “Oh, hey. Here’s the top 10,” and then they don’t even give an article and I think it’s something to do with some sort of search engine optimization. I don’t understand. But it’s like you have to click through to see each one of the 10 there’s like different pages.
Walter Storholt: Oh, gosh. Yes. A slide show story method, right. Where it’s, you got to keep clicking the slideshow and whatever the clickbait image was that you were trying to actually learn the story of never actually appears.
Kevin : Yes. So I’m not sure why that’s done. If anybody knows, please, please send us an email. It’d be interesting to understand it. But I’m interested to understand it. But yeah, I hate those. So this definitely has some more rigor behind it and we’ll kind of talk about what goes into it as well as what some of the top and.
Walter Storholt: bottom cities are. Yeah, there’s actually a whole section in the article explaining the methodology and actually showing you how they weighted the points. So they really do sort of backup all of their reasonings and findings and things like that. So what jumps at you other than the thoroughness of this particular study? What jumps out to you most about this best and worst places to retire study?
Kevin : Well, I would … well, I tell you what. We’ve done this for coming up on a year and a half, and we have never done like a top 10 list. So, I feel like maybe David Letterman or somebody or Dick Clark, maybe I’m dating myself here, but it’s whenever I used to be able to stay up past 9:00 PM at night. I remember watching …
Walter Storholt: I think it’s Ryan Seacrest now would be like the hot name. And Jimmy Fallon. Jimmy Fallon and Ryan Seacrest would be the more appropriate buzz names.
Kevin : Yeah, Jimmy Fallon is great, but I just, I mean we had last weekend Ohio State was playing, which if you live in Ohio and S wasn’t born in Ohio, I was born in Western Pennsylvania, but I’ve been in Ohio, it’s been home for more than 20 years now. And what was striking to me is when I moved to Ohio, you had to be an Ohio State Buckeye football fan because if you weren’t, you were nobody come Saturday. And it was a bit odd to me. It was growing up in Western Pennsylvania. Certainly, we had Penn state but Pitt was actually pretty decent back then as well. And you just didn’t have the sort of unity that seems to be present in Ohio. And I’ve heard maybe there are a little bit differences if you’re in Toledo so it’s pretty close to Michigan and there’s bad blue and yellow people are blue and gold or whatever the heck they are. And then in Cincinnati maybe it’s a little bit different as well.
Kevin : But if Northeast Ohio, even though Columbus is a couple hours away, if you aren’t wearing Scarlet and gray on a Saturday, you are a nobody and you are not invited to anything fun. So, that’s one of the things I learned moving here. And so, the last Friday there they played, and kickoff is at 8:30, and our neighbor sent us a text, my wife and I said, “Hey let’s put the kids to bed and we’ll hang out. And kind of has the baby monitors.” And I was like, “Oh,” I looked to see what time the game started at 8:30 and I took a snapshot of my Fitbit from my phone and showed my average bedtime. Not a single night did I reach 9:00 PM for a bedtime. So I was like, “Yeah, not going to happen.”
Walter Storholt: Oh, no. Oh, no.
Kevin : It’s pretty sad. So nowhere to go, but for the rest of the episode. So let’s do our top 10 list. Okay.
Walter Storholt: All right. I like it. Yeah. And we need to determine for future top 10 lists. Yeah. Do you want drum roll or should we do it? Is the car neck style with different music. Put the envelope to your head and tell me what’s inside of it.
Kevin : I tell you what. To build suspense just a little bit more because, now that we’ve been doing this for a year and a half, I’m starting to get some of these skills of leading in and what have you. Right. Or at least I’m telling myself that. But just to give some context when people hear these names. So to your point about the criteria that went into this, there are four main categories.
Kevin : So affordability is one. Affordability generally constitutes not only costs of living, but also taxes and taxpayer friendliness, both for say like income, property taxes, sales tax. Those are the really three biggies as well as gas. But the gas is probably a little bit on the lower end of those. So, that’s one.
Kevin : And activities ranking. So how many golf courses are there? How many theaters are there? How many music venues? And even bingo halls because if you’re a retiree, you better be playing bingo. It’s like you’re watching Ohio State football in Northeast Ohio. You just have to do it.
Walter Storholt: It’s a rite of passage. Or Bridge Clubs, that kind of thing.
Kevin : Yes. And book clubs are also in there. I’m not sure how they found all the different book clubs, but it’s a criterion that’s in there. And they actually do this not only on an absolute basis, but they look at it per capita. So how many of these per the population.
Kevin : So affordability, activities, quality of life is number three. For the criteria. Weather is a big one here. Crime, friendliness of the population. So apparently there was an AARP study on friendliness and I didn’t look at it, but I would have to imagine that people from, no offense to any listeners from like New York or Philadelphia, New Jersey, but it’s a little bit rougher neck of the woods and us, wonderful Midwestern people that always say hi and goodbye and wave and smile and things like that. And, I would speculate there we’re definitely a friendlier part of the country.
Walter Storholt: Sneak peek. There are no Northeastern States represented in the top 10.
Kevin : All right, there we go. So I was pretty much right there. Right.
Walter Storholt: Yeah.
Kevin: And then also kind of just age considerations what’s the demographic? Are there more elderly people there? Are there more retirees? Is it retiree friendly? Is it more of a younger community? This is something interesting in and of itself because sometimes you have people and a preference to be around more people like them. And other times I’ve heard clients say that “Hey, we were in a retirement community and we miss being around some of the younger people and just having more of a mix.” So, kind of to each their own. But that criterion is in there as well.
Kevin : And then the fourth and last broad category of the criteria was healthcare. So one of the interesting things was life expectancy. Now as you would imagine, and we’ve talked about before, but, the more money you have, typically more wealth, better health care, better food, all this kind of stuff goes into life expectancy. So it’s not if you are really in poor health in Northeast Ohio and you move to I think Naples, Florida, I heard a news story and when I was actually there last year, they were saying that they had the longest life expectancy out of any town in the country. I’ll assume that the news story was accurate. I don’t know if it was the same that was referenced in this study or not, but it doesn’t mean that if you just move there, there’s all of a sudden the fountain of youth that you jump into and you’re cured and you’re living longer, but you get the idea there.
Walter Storholt: Is that the causation does not equal correlation moniker or phrase? Is that applied there? Maybe not quite.
Kevin : Not exactly. Yeah. Well, can I give a quick example of that? So when I was in grad school and taking a stats class, we did, I remember this very clearly, we did a study to prove that point about correlation does not mean causation. And we demonstrated that ice cream consumption was highly correlated with an increase in the murder rate. And I forget the city, but does that mean eating ice cream caused an increase in the murder rate or does it maybe mean that it was summer or people were out and about and there was more activity that was going on? It was in one of these Northeastern or just one of the Northern towns. Whereas in the summer, or in the wintertime, everybody’s inside staying warm. So, that’s the old correlation does not equal causation.
Walter Storholt: I can see the newspaper headline. It’s not, there’s something in the water. It’s, there’s something in the ice cream.
Kevin : Right. But we digress again. Let me get back on topic here again for healthcare. So the fourth basket, the fourth criteria, life expectancy, suicide rate of the elderly. I thought that was an interesting one. And then also just kind of looking at the physicians per capita or they looked at it at like per 10,000 residents. So to look at it again, affordability, activities, quality of life, and then health care.
Kevin : And what they did was they equally weighted on these. And to your point earlier, each of these has different subcategories. So in terms of affordability, their adjusted cost of living was at 10 points. And so that was 10% of the total weighting for all these four criteria. Taxpayer friendliness is in there as well. And basically it’s a few different categories, but it adds up to about another 10 points. So cost of living and taxes basically comprises 20 points or 20% of the total of all four categories.
Kevin: But there are all kinds of others that maybe have one or two or 3% that kind of go into this. It was, , certainly as you’re looking at this and you may say, “Well, heck, I have a couple million bucks in my IRA and I’m going to have to pay tax on that sucker when I pull the money out, and so the taxes are more important for me than just 10%,” and certainly that’s, that could be true.
Kevin: So, it’s not saying this ranking or criteria will apply to you or, a lot of people say that “Hey Florida’s great. It’s warmer, but I don’t like the humidity and so I’m going to go to Arizona or I’m going to go somewhere else.” So, we all have our own preferences again, you can see kind of how these criteria play out for this study if you particularly go in and you take a look at it. They do provide a lot of detail, which is great, but that’s how it’s constructed. So we may have personal preferences. We’ll talk about some other personal preferences after we get through our much anticipated top 10 list here that we are about to commence, but that’s kind of what goes into it.
Kevin : So Walter, drum roll, please.
Walter Storholt: Without further ado, the top 10 best retirement cities. Here’s Kevin Kroskey. How about that?
Kevin : That’s going to be way better than what I’m going to be able to do. So number 10 on the list, and I’m not going to even do it because I’m just going to set myself up for failure.
Walter Storholt: Small doses, small doses. That’s the key.
Kevin : Cheyenne, Wyoming. All right, let’s hear it for Cheyenne.
Walter Storholt: Yeah.
Kevin : When I first saw this, it didn’t say Wyoming. It just had the abbreviation WY. I’m like, “What the heck is that like? Oh, it’s Wyoming.”
Walter Storholt: Oh, that’s a good dig in Wyoming. It didn’t even recognize your abbreviation.
Kevin: Yeah, I’ve personally, I’ve never been to Wyoming yet. I mean, certainly, want to go. There are some great things to see there, but I haven’t been there. I don’t know much about Cheyenne, but in terms of the affordability ranking, it is number two on the list and there are about 200 different cities that were ranked here. So it’s not number one, but it’s number two. On the other hand, it is number 142 on the activities rank and the other two rankings are kind of middle of the road. But Cheyenne, Wyoming at number 10.
Walter Storholt: The affordability really boosting it there.
Kevin : Yes, very, very much so. All right. So for number nine, we have Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Walter Storholt: Okay.
Kevin : I think I pronounced that right. You have to, I think you have to say Minnesota or something to that effect. What was … wasn’t it Fargo or what was the old TV show that was set in … no, that was South Dakota. My bad.
Walter Storholt: Yeah. Fargo, you’re thinking of Fargo.
Kevin : Yes, my bad.
Walter Storholt: So isn’t it on the Oh, like Minnesota?
Kevin : Yeah. I just think of Jesse the wrestler that became the governor and he had a very interesting intonation. But yeah, Minnesota. They’re one of them, actually few States. There are only about 10 or 11 states that tax social security for retirees. I know Minnesota is one of them. So most other States do not tax social security. So they may have state income taxes, but they will exclude social security. Ohio is one of those, Pennsylvania is one of those. Again, the vast majority of states don’t tax the security, but Minnesota does. So they score pretty low on the affordability and pretty high on everything else.
Kevin : So number eight, we have Cape Coral, Florida. So Cape Coral is just kind of to the Northwest of Fort Myers. More people are familiar with. There is a pretty big airport there. And a Cape Coral is very quickly growing. So as I shared in a prior episode, my family and I have a home down in Southwest Florida. We are actually in the very Northern part of Naples, which is about a half-hour, 45 minutes South of Cape Coral. And Cape Coral is definitely very affordable. No state income taxes, property taxes are pretty favorable in Florida as well. A lot of activities, pretty good quality of life and healthcare actually, they’re kind of more middle of the road there. But Florida, Cape Coral, Florida, number eight.
Walter Storholt: I have a feeling that won’t be the last Florida we see.
Kevin : You would be right. There’s actually five Florida cities in the top eight and so Cape Coral was the first one of them. Number seven is Fort Lauderdale. So now we’re going to go over to the other coast. Fort Lauderdale, also known as New York with Palm trees. We have Fort Lauderdale.
Walter Storholt: I like that. That’s good.
Kevin : Well, I’ve heard a lot of people. There’s a … you’re actually getting a lot of people. It’s much more crowded over on the East coast of Florida compared to the West Coast and the West Coast is known to be more Midwestern. But I can tell you that, that it’s definitely changing. There’s a lot of people that … we actually know a lot of people that live in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area and they will vacation over to the Gulf coast over to the other coast.
Walter Storholt: Is that right?
Kevin : I was surprised by that, but there’s some very beautiful beaches not as populated, so definitely kind of a different feel compared to the ocean side, but yeah, Fort Lauderdale, it comes in at number seven.
Kevin : For number six we are going to go West and we’re going to cross the Mississippi. We are going to go into Denver, Colorado it scores very high on the activities ranking number 17. I don’t know if that’s related to some of the more recent legislation as it relates to different natural plants that people may ingest.
Walter Storholt: “Recreation.”
Kevin : Affordability. It’s not all that great. We’ve had some clients in Denver and just the appreciation for the housing has been astronomical, but activities scores very high, health care scores very high. Kind of a quick aside, Walter, I’ll embarrass myself a little bit here, but my wife calls me, well, she says, I’m like rain man with a lot of the things that I remember, but there’s certain things that I, and maybe men in general, aren’t as good in terms of remembering. They may be considered important by some and they tend to be things like, oh, your wallet, your phone, and your keys. So I don’t know if you ever have any issues with those items, Walter.
Walter Storholt: Yeah, the simplest things in life.
Kevin : And so I’ve also had this issue with travel in the past. I was flying into Chicago for … I had a morning meeting and I was flying. There are two airports as most people know in Chicago and I just realized as they announced that we were coming in for landing into Midway, that I flew into the wrong airport and there was no way that I was going to get from Midway to O’Hare in time for my morning meeting. So that was one. My sister lived in San Diego for about a decade. I gave her hugs and kisses and goodbyes and said, “It was great to spend time with you.” Went to the airport. And then I realized I showed up a day early, so I had to get her to come pick me up.
Walter Storholt: There’s a third story. Wow. Okay.
Kevin : Well, I was flying into Denver for the first time and I had some of these issues, lapses in my recent past and then they announced, and this was soon after the Chicago incident and they were like, “And we’re approaching arrival here,” and I’m looking around. And it was the first time I’d flown into Denver and I’m expecting Rocky mountains and I’m looking around, I see nothing bout planes and I’m like, “Oh, crap. I did the Chicago thing again. I flew into the wrong airport,” and here I flew into the right airport. It’s just that the Rockies were a little bit further away, so I wasn’t as in tune with the geography. But anyway, yeah. So, it was a bit of a … if you’re traveling with me, don’t let me make the reservations.
Walter Storholt: Don’t put Kevin in charge.
Kevin : So Denver is number six. For number five we’re going back to Miami, Florida. So Miami’s beautiful. My sister actually lives in Miami now. Very cosmopolitan, very international. We actually very much enjoy going and visiting there. I don’t know if we would necessarily like to live there, at least for us personally, but it’s number five on the list. Activities, very, very high up there. Number five, affordability is still pretty good largely because of the reasonable property taxes and no state income taxes. And healthcare is kind of middle of the road as well. But a lot of activities, pretty good affordability as well.
Walter Storholt: I’ve spent some time in Coral Gables traveling with the basketball team for several years when I was doing announcing and so we got to spend a couple of days each year down in Coral Gables and in that area, in that vicinity. And very pretty. I mean, just your everyday average street was pretty and well-appointed around that Miami area.
Kevin : Yes, very much so. And Miami Beach is beautiful as well. So number four, we’re going to go a little bit to the North. We’re going to go into Charleston, South Carolina. So, Walter, this isn’t too far from you and unfortunately, I have not yet been to Charleston, South Carolina, but I hear absolutely wonderful things about it.
Walter Storholt: I have not either, actually. It’s one of those spots that for whatever reason I just haven’t been able to get to yet. It’s actually pretty … it’s still a pretty decent drive down there and there’s just not a very direct route from central North Carolina. You’d have to kind of take quite a circuitous route to get there. So I’ve seen some other parts of the South Carolina beaches and those areas, but haven’t made it down to Charleston yet. My wife has been there and she really enjoyed it. She said it’s very nice, very, very hot. 102 degrees when she was there that day.
Kevin : And Charleston scores high. They’re pretty uniform. They’re like top 25% or so in everything with activities actually being in the top 10%. Whereas we started with Cheyenne and Cheyenne was very affordable, but there was very little to do. you have somewhere like Charleston then and it scores very high on all of those. So.
Walter Storholt: Probably the most balanced rank of any of the top 10 I’d say.
Kevin : Yeah, I know I would agree. Well, we’ll … yes. We’ll go to number one though. When we get to number one it’s not too dissimilar I would say. They just are really strong in a couple of areas but pretty well balanced overall. But before we get to number one, we have number three, Scottsdale, Arizona. So another very active city for retirees and the surrounding area. There’s a lot of deserts that keep being developed and we have clients, several clients around Scottsdale and Chandler and Goodyear Heights and even up into Prescott a little bit more into the mountains North of that area.
Walter Storholt: Snowbird central in Scottsdale I feel like. That’s where my grandparents have gone for the last 15 or 20 years. For three months. Every year they had that. They live in Maine and so they make the cross country trip out to Scottsdale each year.
Kevin : Yeah. And, you certainly have more, I would say you have a lot of people to the East of the Mississippi that go down to Florida. I know a lot of people in Florida from Minnesota, a lot of Canadians as well come down for obvious reasons. But, the people that go out to Arizona are west of the Mississippi or prefer the more arid climate of Arizona compared to the more humid climate of Florida. And the Cleveland Indians also have spring training out there, which tends to be a nice draw for some of our Northeast Ohioans as well.
Kevin : Coming in at number two, we’re going to go back to Florida and we are going to go to Tampa, Florida. So we’re back on the Gulf coast. We are a little bit more North of Cape Coral that we talked about earlier, and they score very high on affordability, very high on activities, top 25% in terms of quality of life and middle of the road for healthcare. So Tampa, Florida, coming in number two. And Walter, you got to set up number one here. How are we going to go ahead and climax this thing?
Walter Storholt: All right, will it be in Florida? Number one, best retirement city. Dun, dun, dun.
Kevin : And it’s where Mickey mouse lives. It’s Orlando, Florida. Awesome.
Walter Storholt: All right. Happiest Place on earth.
Kevin : Yes. So Orlando, Florida, very affordable. Number nine on the list, and again, there’s about 200 cities in total. Number 11 for activities, quality of life, they’re top third and healthcare they’re top 25%. So where Charleston is very well balanced, I would say Orlando’s kind of similar in terms, but they definitely score a lot higher in terms of affordability and activities. So, one of our neighbors in Florida relocated from Orlando because she said it was too cold in Orlando in those December, January, February and wanted to go a little bit further South. So to each their own. If you’re going to go to the ocean or to the Gulf, it’s a little bit of a drive either way — get to Cocoa beach or get over to Clearwater beach or something like that.
Kevin : But certainly a lot to do in Orlando with Disney World, Universal Studios. Some would say maybe it’s a little bit too touristy, but there’s also a lot of areas just outside of Orlando that people go to as well. But that’s our top 10 list. So we have five of the top eight being in Florida and a few others that are there as well.
Kevin : So while I’m a very positive person, if we go to the bottom of the list very quickly …
Walter Storholt: Uh-oh.
Kevin : Yeah, sorry California. But you have five of the top 10 in the bottom, and as you can probably expect, affordability is quite poor in certain California cities, and these are not the big ones in terms of San Francisco or Los Angeles or San Diego, but these tend to be ones that are a little bit more inland that they’re just ranking pretty poorly. So there you go.
Kevin : So we will link to this article and again I think it’s good. It definitely has some objectivity. You can actually do some deeper dives into maybe some of these rankings or some of the criteria that are more important to you. Affordability is a big one for a lot of people maybe you’re able to retire sooner, spend more. Obviously affordability will go ahead and play a big factor in that. A state and some cities that we did mention, Tennessee scores pretty high on that list. Also, no state income tax fairly reasonable cost of living. On the other hand, going to Hawaii, while I have not yet been, it’s quite a long trip from Ohio and particularly with kids, but someday maybe. But that is definitely quite expensive as well as a lot of the California, Washington DC type places as well.
Kevin : So that’s the list. Some other considerations that a lot of clients will often come up with: where’s your family? Where are your kids at? Where are your grandkids at? And, and oh by the way kids have a way of moving for work. We had a client that had a home in Ohio and Florida and they just retired this year. They sold the Ohio home. They were thinking they were going to buy a place in Columbus, and lo and behold, one of their two sons, both of them live in Columbus. One got promoted and is in California now. And he’s out there at least for a few years he committed to, and who knows. But the parents were dead set on buying a condo in Columbus and now they have a bit of a screeching halt to those plans just to wait and see what happens.
Kevin : And so just be mindful that. Your kids are certainly going to be mobile. We’ve had some other clients take the approach where, “Hey, we’re going to get a nice place down in Florida. We want to, maybe we’re not going to see our kids all the time, but we’re going to make it very nice and inviting and heck maybe we are even going to buy their plane tickets for them to come down and spend some time with us on a regular basis, and they can get out of the cold for a long weekend for spring break while their kids aren’t in school.” Things like that.
Kevin : A lot of clients have to go ahead and take care of their parents or want to take care of their parents. And so maybe going away for a number of months, whether they’re renting or owning, they don’t feel that they can do or, maybe they can, but, emotionally it’s difficult. Maybe they can get on a direct plane and get back, but maybe they just don’t want to do that. So those plans are on hold.
Kevin : But all these things kind of come into play for what’s going to work for you. But I do like this study in the sense that it’s pretty robust. It has a lot of different criteria that are pretty meaningful. And then for your own specific criteria that are meaningful, you can really kind of drill down into it and start looking and start envisioning maybe what retirement looks like for you and particularly where it may be for you.
Walter Storholt: It gets the wheels turning, looking at these kinds of lists, that’s for sure. And starting to think about it. Yeah. What would retirement look like in Colorado? What would it look like out in Maine or down in Florida? That seems to be popular, and there must be something to it that people are enjoying. Right? So should we look into that a little bit further? Do we want to go off the beaten path more?
Walter Storholt: What kinds of activities, right? I mean you talked about there being lots of activities to do in Denver. Well, if you’re not outdoorsy or very active person, well what would that “activities list” truly look like then at that point? How much is it bolstered by really active lifestyles versus someone who might be more inclined to go to the theater and that kind of thing? Maybe a New York or a Newark or somewhere in that region that lists and ranks near the bottom becomes very attractive now if you say, “I want to go to a Broadway play every single month that’s my idea of retirement.” Well, it starts to skew things in totally different directions. So it’s just interesting to get the juices flowing to talk about these kinds of things.
Kevin : And let me give a quick shout out here. So I mentioned, I’m originally from outside of Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh comes in at number 24 on the list. Where we live now and we’re, our main office is located Akron, Ohio, comes in at number 40 on the list. Very affordable plenty of things to do in terms of the quality of life. Most notably the weather, not so great for many, many months in these cities. But there you have it. And then they have, Cleveland comes in at number 74. So our big brother to the North for Akron, but Akron beats Cleveland’s pants on this study. So there you go, Cleveland.
Walter Storholt: And we’ve got my neck of the woods in Raleigh, North Carolina, central, North Carolina coming in at 37 on the list. So a good affordability it looks like in our area. I don’t know how much longer that’s going to last, though. We may be dropping down these rankings because that seems to be our strong suit at the moment.
Kevin: Yeah, I actually misspoke. Akron is actually 39. So they’re really kind of top third for every single ranking. So pretty uniform there. So definitely not a bad place to be. It’s just there’s a couple of about three or three or four months that’s definitely quite a bear.
Walter Storholt: Absolutely. Well, if you want to go check out this article and this study and look at the findings for yourself, again, we’ll have a link to this on the website, truewealthdesign.com and we’ll have a link in the show notes of today’s episode. So whatever app you’re using, just look at the description or the show notes and you’ll see the link to it as well. This wallethub.com article of the best and worst places to retire. Very interesting. Sparks some fun discussion as well. Go to truewealthdesign.com or, again, check the description of today’s episode if you want to check out the link and get all the great information on this. You think this kind of opens the door, Kevin, over the next couple of episodes that we’re going to be doing to kind of be talking a little bit more about snowbirds and planning for those who may be on the move and considering moves and that kind of thing. We’re setting the stage for that a little bit here.
Kevin : Yeah, I think we should talk about [inaudible 00:00:31:29]. So again, my family and I, we’ve been snowbirds now for about five or six years. So, we’ve done it, have firsthand experience. So, all the way from financial planning and tax considerations. There’s a lot of ones that are commonly known. There’s a lot of others that are important and aren’t as commonly known. So we’ll get into that. Maybe we’ll even talk about how do you do it? A lot of people don’t want to have the hassle of two homes even if they can afford it. Frankly, we’ve been able to use technology and some other ways to make it very palatable to go ahead and do. Certainly, there’s a little bit of a learning curve, but we can talk about that.
Kevin: And also, I think about retiree housing, in general, there’s a lot of people. We have a lot of clients, our baby boomer clients or their parents who, frankly, they’re stuck in their home. They would probably describe their parents as being a little bit stubborn. They won’t go into a retirement community and, that’s their home and they’re going to stay there forever and they’re going to drag them out feet first. But then they also become very isolated. They’re not socially engaged and it also has other negative impacts on their life.
Kevin : So you’re seeing a big movement towards retirement communities, continuing care retirement communities where you can be independent, you can get nursing home care and everything in between. I think retiree housing in general is changing a lot. So I think there’s a lot that we can unpack and deliver a lot of good value and just so Jermaine, I mean where we’re going to live and what we’re going to do and how we’re going to spend our time when we have so much more of it compared to when we’re working, all incredibly important decisions. So I think we’re kind of writing a future series here as we wrap this one up, Walter.
Walter Storholt: Absolutely. I think we have set the stage for that conversation so we’ll look forward to having those discussions over the next couple of episodes as we record today’s show, get closer and closer to the end of 2019 and get ready to turn the page to a new decade, Kevin, coming up around the corner. Kind of hard to fathom and grasp that, but we’ve passed another decade here. So that’s going to be fun to talk about as we get ready to turn the calendar page coming up soon. For Kevin Kroskey, I’m Walter Storholt. Thank you so much for tuning into the show. A great chance for me to remind you if you haven’t subscribed to the podcast yet, be sure to do that on your favorite app. You can always come back to truewealthdesign.com to listen to the show where we post them each time, but you can certainly subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google podcast, Stitcher, and all your favorite podcasting apps. Just look for the show, Retire Smarter. That’s all you have to do and you’ll be able to find us there and subscribe and never miss an episode. For Kevin Kroskey, I’m Walter Storholt and we’ll talk to you next time back here on Retire Smarter.
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