Quote:
Originally Posted by StealthRabbit
30 min to medical and 1 hr to full shopping is too far IMHO
Having grown up near Estes Park, CO, I am very familiar with people who visit on holidays and desire to relocate and stay (for retirement). sometimes that works out, often it does not. My TX location is quite the same. Retiree haven. Place where many retirees vacationed / went to camp as a child. Many come back for retirement, many end up spending a bundle on a new home, only to have to sell and leave for various reasons. (Often health, mobility, eldercare, or they don't like the year round climate. Spouse misses family...) I have bought several bargain homes due to this 'mandatory change'.
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Interesting. The wife and I dedicated 2-1/2 years to looking at our most desirable retirement locations east of the Rockies. I was sure it would be Custer, since I spent decades visiting there, and was head over heels in love with the area.
We found four deal breakers.
1. It was too remote for adequate medical care. My wife need one specialist with reasonable availability. This is life or death, as she needs access to somebody to troubleshot an implanted medical device if it is having issues. The only provider showed up once a month, to Rapid City, from out of state. That was a hard no, for obvious reasons.
2. We found your entire statement about retirees who end up making a mistake, and moving on in a few short years, to be a pretty profound realization and 1000% true. We had several brutal conversations with retirees, from all kinds of desirable locations. Folks who were either in the process of unwinding the mistake they made, or were now in an unhappy marriage since one partner loved the place to death and the other thought it was an unworkable horror story, or were stuck since they didn't have the resources for a do-over.
3. Politics. We got to become friends with several business owners in the Custer area. All were radical right conservatives who made it clear that it's either their way or the highway, in local politics and culture. They, the local media, and other events and encounters made it quite clear that there is little room for any other folks with a different point of view. Doesn't matter what my personal beliefs are, I have no interest in living in a hive mind, that has one tribe that you must be a part of.
$. We were a bit surprised to learn that Custer sort of rolled the sidewalks up, as the tourist season dries up. The first wave was explained to us as being the first of Oct, as most tourist business stops, then at Thanksgiving, when a lot of normal businesses actually shutter for the winter. By March, those businesses start to emerge from the den, and the town slowly wakes up. Living in near ghost town, for four months a year wasn't acceptable for us.
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