Quick question for those approaching retirement. Which has been addressed a few times, probably.
How are you deciding whether to move to a new area or stay near friends and your support network?
If it wasn’t for friends here, I’d have no issues at all of moving to our favorite place to visit. A good friend moved there last year so I don’t doubt that we’d get connected quick. But to leave everyone behind as we depart from work seems like it could be a bad idea.
As you know, I already did that, a few years before retirement (hopefully!) as we moved back to the college town, primarily for all of the built in stuff to do. We have season tix for football, men's and women's basketball, and T&F. Multiple big time track meets a year, with the NCAAs, Prefontaine Classic, and Olympic Trials all coming up in the next 6 weeks, and we had the World Championships last year. We hit up a random baseball, softball, volleyball, lax game once in a while. I got involved with supporting my fraternity, serving on the Housing Corp (had a current member that works at a local restaurant bring me a free and heavy pour of Pappy Van WInkle when I was dining there with friends a while back!). We get a decent concert or stand-up coming through town every few months. We're only 100 miles from Portland so have been up there for a show or two. We have a regional airport here (I can go driveway to gate in under 30 minutes), and PDX is less than 2 hours away.
There was also the financial aspect - I couldn't afford a house in the Bay Area (or didn't want to pay that much, at least) so always rented, but bought a house here in Oregon for a fraction of what we would have paid down there. Taxes are cheaper, insurance is cheaper....hell, everything is cheaper.
The weather in the winter in Oregon can be a drag, no doubt, and I do miss the Bay Area. But it's an hour flight or 8 hour drive to get back there, which is handy as I assume my daughter will stay in Nor Cal when she graduates from college next year.