Anyone move to prepare for retirement in a new community?

My wife and I are in our mid fifties. We are fortunate to own a nice house on an acre in a very desirable rural area, withing commuting distance of Vancouver.  Our house is now worth a lot of money. I think more and more about leaving for a quieter area of British Columbia. I would wind up with an equally nice house on more acres for about two thirds of what I would get for mine. So mortgage free with hundreds of thousands in the bank, and no more sirens, traffic jams and bustle.

My wife is on board, with her criteria being a scenic area with a decent climate, and lots of hiking and mountains. This is not hard to achieve in British Columbia. My criteria is pretty simple. No traffic, close to a good auto parts store and a large well insulated shop.  

But I do have reservations. Would my kids come home to visit?  I know they will not stay in our current town anyway. Two of three have already left. The third will probably go to Uni and get a city job because that is how he is wired. That is one thing to mull over. Right now they have a home base until they create their own. If we move there may be less incentive to come home to visit as school friends and other family would be in the old town.

The other thing is, how hard is it to join a new community at 58 or 60 years old? I have heard unhappy stories of people who moved somewhere new for retirement and wished they had never left. Anyone gone here before me? I have lived in this town all my life, as has my wife. Right now the tentative plan is to sell and move in about three to four years. But we may buy property in a couple years and start to build something. Still figuring things out. 

I am living your opening paragraph we sold the house in North Vancouver and bought in Qualicum Beach. You can move here and be one of the young 'uns.  

You are right the province has lots of great choices and you will find you fit it in, your moving from Alberta or Ontario. 

When I retire, they'll probably move me to cold storage at the morgue. 

In reply to Rons :

We have friends who just moved to Qualicum Beach. They are retired at about fifty and built a new house there a year ago. I like the island but ferries and traffic and getting worse. I don't consider it an improvement.

Moving to the Island was a compromise. A compromise in my direction would have more Clinton, 70 Mile, 100 Mile or really the lakes close by.

In reply to Rons :

I do like the Cariboo Chilcotin quite a lot. But winters are longer. We are thinking Creston Grand Forks Armstrong. But I have a few years to narrow it down.

I hear Rossland doesn't even have traffic lights...

Wherever the wife unit and I move to next, the town name will end in "unincorporated".

I want to move and have enough land to have a detached shop.  However I also want to still be close enough to the city to be able to go to the grocery store, restaurants, movies and see friends easily.  So moving way out of town, while initially attractive, wouldn't work for me. 

I have a friend who's bought a mountain house and spends almost every weekend there.  Which is great but now he doesn't see any of his friends down here in the city at all.  I don't want that.

So you need to decide how much of the city conveniences you're going to miss if you move out into the country, including friends/family.

I have a long thread from a few years ago sort of pondering this question.  We're on track to retire within 2 years.  I'm 55, DD is 57.

We live in a college town south of Philly in the Midatlantic region. It was awesome 25 years ago when we moved here.  It's no longer awesome.  It actually is the town that's changed, not us.  I've lived in this general vicinty almost all my life, and DW has lived most of hers around here too.  But the localized area is not developing in a way we like at all.

Almost all the family we are in contact with is within an hour of where we are right now, except DW's only sister, who is in the far burbs north west of New York City.  DD#2 is currently in Indy but I don't see that being permanent.  I suspect both she and DD#1 will wind up in Philadelphia.

I don't necessarily want to move to the salt-and-snow region, but we both really really want to get away from the summer heat and humidity around here, which pretty much blankets the entire area we're familiar with.  We don't want to live in New York, but upstate PA, New Hampshire, or Vermont might be options.

We'll have no trouble selling our house for enough to get something nice anywhere that isn't ridiculous.  I would really like to buy some land and design our own house.

I'm just worried that we'd take the plunge and move a fair distance away into new territory, and then end up not liking it.

Just a point of reference from the other side of this:

My parents (now just my mom) moved to a house on the lake ~3 or 4 years ago.  I visit them more often than I did at their old house, because it is closer.  However, its still not that frequent.  The house is in a beautiful community, on the waterfront, great view, etc.  and 30 minutes from anything.  Boating and swimming is fun, but even a 5 year old gets tired of it.  Aside from that its straight up cabin fever, which is kind of miserable.

My ex's parents are moving to a loft/condo/whatever in downtown Asheville.  That sounds amazing.  I'm sure she and the boy will visit there all the time because there is a ton of stuff to do.

Also:  RE community.  My mom has made a ton of friends and it seems to be a great community for her.  It concerns me a bit because all of the friends she has made are exactly the same and equally detached from reality in the 750k+ lake houses in their isolated neighborhood.  Also there is the issue that some of them are snowbirds and only there in the summer.  Right now the place is a wasteland.

As we age (sorry, we do) what if you had a medical emergency?  Are you near services?  Or if you crush a limb, cut something badly in the shop, will you make it to urgent care before you bleed out.  One more, in 10 years will your quiet Ponderosa be exactly what you're leaving now?

I think "joining a community" is a personality question, do you mingle?

Following closely, our 4 BR Victorian is getting to be one ten minute job after another, but don't know exactly where to go.

I know a couple of folks who live in BC and one constant complaint is a lack of good internet access.  One of them is on the waiting list for Star Link.  While this may or may not apply to you, it's something to look into when researching potential properties. 

Otherwise, I don't really know... Part of me would love to get a larger property with land and room for a large shop, but I also kinda like where I live and how nobody really cares much about what you do (I lucked into a neighborhood of fellow car-guys), despite being smack in the middle of Philly suburbs. 

Wife and I have been having this discussion as well. With the warehouses moving in around us we were tempted to sell at a decent profit and then build new farther out. But the house is almost paid for and we both want to live someplace without real winter.

We would be moving to a small community, and one requirement for me that I did not mention is proximity to an airport. So that puts us withing an hour or so of a larger center, and we would be within a five minute drive of a small town with all the basic necessities. I would not want to live all by myself on the side of a lake somewhere. Sounds idyllic but it would be very isolated. 

While we're considerably further out from retirement still, from our observations:

If the kids happen to live in the same metro area, it might be possible for us to as well so that we can have a more tight-knit family dynamic where our family is part of our community. But we're not counting on that. Our expectation is that if we want to see our kids regularly, we will need to come to them. Which makes sense, as our schedules will be far more flexible than theirs. Anything they do to occasionally come to us will be simply be the icing on the cake. Additionally, if it is neither the home nor town they grew up in, which it won't be, it also would no longer be 'coming home' to visit. It will simply be coming to visit.

It is only as hard as we make it to join any new community, regardless of age. We can also only be as ingrained in any community as the time we spend as active participants within it. The further we are physically from said community, unless it's primarily online, the more difficult this will be. So this may also mean making compromises on other locational desires.

When considering a towns potential for growth as a negative, also remember that a shrinking (or too small) town can also be problematic from a 'community' perspective as well.

Driven5 said:

While we're considerably further out from retirement still, from our observations:

If the kids happen to live in the same metro area, it might be possible for us to as well so that we can have a more tight-knit family dynamic where our family is part of our community. But we're not counting on that. Our expectation is that if we want to see our kids regularly, we will need to come to them. Which makes sense, as our schedules will be far more flexible than theirs. Anything they do to occasionally come to us will be simply be the icing on the cake. Additionally, if it is neither the home nor town they grew up in, which it won't be, it also would no longer be 'coming home' to visit. It will simply be coming to visit.

It is only as hard as we make it to join any new community, regardless of age. We can also only be as ingrained in any community as the time we spend as active participants within it. The further we are physically from said community, unless it's primarily online, the more difficult this will be. So this may also mean making compromises on other locational desires.

When looking at small towns and considering the potential for growth as a negative, also remember that if a town isn't growing, it's dying.

Its a valid point, about kids. Why should I expect that they should be the ones to visit me? 

Small towns are not necessarily dying. They just are not growing quickly. I do look at that and the stats are there to see. Rural farming communities just plug along without much change for decades, much as my current town did until it was swept up in the ever increasing commuting circle. 

In reply to bearmtnmartin :

I did go back and edit my verbiage, but I still see it as fundamentally most towns are either growing or dying...Even if it's not happening quickly.

In reply to Driven5 :

I am also dying, so the trick is to find a town that will outlast me.

I can't see leaving the place I've lived my entire adult life.  The sun shines in the summer, it is cold as balls in the winter, but I know everyone I need to, and I know where stuff is.

If my home were a whole lot more valuable (Vancouver) I would certainly consider moving, but remain within the services available, just in a house that leaves a few hundred grand in my bank account, and enough spare cash to lease a small place in Texas for a couple of months a year.

Grass being greener, and all that.

In reply to 914Driver :

In BC some of the urgent care situations are mitigated by the integration of the health care services. All the province is served by BCEHS ( ambulance service which operates ground vehicles, fixed and rotary wing craft) so getting scooped and transferred is in the realm of possibility.

To bearmtnmartin I will say starting to think about it is a great idea,I might not of shared with people but my move had about 3 years of thinking behind it.

In reply to bearmtnmartin :

You forgot that as you age you tend to need hospitals more. Good hospitals really are a matter of life or death. 
 If you're planning on moving to near a good hospital your plan sounds logical. 
    
Now you could be among the 2% who never need a hospital. Maybe you come from a long lived family and won't need the medical expertise of a good hospital. maybe you will avoid a work place accident or traffic accident.  Heck maybe even avoid viruses and germs as well as who knows what comes down the line. 
 

but since the odds are so much against it. ? 

I would always be within an hour of a large hospital. In fact even smaller communities in Southern BC usually have a small hospital.  And free too......

In reply to frenchyd :

Agreed.

I'm a stats guy that works in med-tech and I've seen eye popping studies showing how much longer the life expectancy is for elderly people that have quick access to a high quality, full service hospital.

Many (perhaps even most) elderly people will experience at least one medical emergency that could be fully or at least mostly resolved if they had it and either kills them or sets them on the path to death if they don't.

Obviously, the studies are correlational (you can't randomly assign people to living close or far away) so perhaps their are important covariates (healthy people tend to be more affluent and affluent people tend to live closer to resources, etc.) but the significance levels (P-Values) are huge.  Within the limits of what the math can and can't tell us, I think living close to a high quality, full service hospital is really important.

I'm 56, lived my whole life in Southern California, and I'm thinking through the stay or go decision now...being close to a great hospital is a "need" not a "want" for me.

In this argument, what would be considered as a close hospital... distance wise?  or travel time wise?

bearmtnmartin said:

I would always be within an hour of a large hospital. In fact even smaller communities in Southern BC usually have a small hospital.  And free too......

You probably know about the "golden hour"...back off the the time required for the EMT's to get to you and put some MoE in there as well.  For me, living more than twenty minutes away causes real concern.

On January 20th of 2021, I'll be a year older than my brother was when he had an aortic bifurcation in the middle of downtown Los Angeles...UCLA and USC were just miles away but due to the horrible traffic we always have, they were effectively "out of range".  He was transported to a local medical center, a helicopter was brought in and they started to fly him to USC when he went into full cardiac arrest shortly after takeoff and died.

I want to keep it simple...big, modern, full service hospital just a few minutes away on reliably un-congested, un-snowy, un-problem of any kind roads.