America's 100 Best Places to Retire: The Only Guide You Need to Today's Top Retirement Towns

By: Elizabeth Armstrong

Book Overview

This book blends highly readable personal accounts of great retirement spots with essential statistics on climate, cost of living, taxes, housing costs, crime rates, and health care. 100 maps. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0978607708
• ISBN13: 9780978607708
• Release Date: April 2007
• Publisher: Vacation Publications
• Length: 349 Pages
• Weight: 2.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 8.4" x 10.8"

Customer Reviews

Good information

Good information on healthcare & taxes. Easy read, good information. A number of the interviews seem to be with people with a HIGE retirement income, I think they should have interviewed the average person

Gwen1

Great insight on places,I had considered for retirement. Many places I had not thought of, seem appealing.

Informative book

This is a good book giving lots of information. The stats I liked and are very useful. The narrative could have been better in that the interviews with the people for the most part seem to be with people who have lots of available cash. Not exactly your average retiree. I know this from those who were interviewed in this book who retired to my area (Arizona). Only the upper crust can afford to live and do what these people who were interviewed could do. Take the interviews with a grain of salt. I live here and I can't afford to retire here.

How do you rate a place?

Some towns seem to have a permanent place on the sweetheart lists of books dedicated to relocation and retirement. It is unusual to see such books without Charlottesville, Virginia, Branson, Missouri or Grand Junction, Colorado and indeed these locales, along with 97 others, fill the pages of AMERICA'S 100 BEST PLACES TO RETIRE. This is a helpful book, but not an indispensable one. A good half of the towns or counties listed here are also in the 203-item RETIREMENT PLACES RATED (2004), which uses statistics far more than AMERICA'S 100, and generates competitive rankings. AMERICA'S 100 does, though, look at its places in a great deal more detail. An info box in each chapter, alphabetized by town name, offers brief stats as to climate, hospital beds, major housing developments and the like, as well as contact lists for the various Chambers of Commerce or whatever other agency is responsible for promoting each place. This brings in some objective data into what otherwise is a subjective process. But the bulk of each chapter is given up to a narrative description of each particular place's "vibe" and a series of interiews with residents who relocated there either in middle age or during retirement. These are almost always middle-class couples with enough money to spend on middle-rank (or above) housing, or the wherewithal to build their own. Those interviewed will be a mix of people from the same region and those from far away, who fell across their new communities through a combination of research, personal recommendations, and plain old serendipity--stumbling across it on vacation, say. Together with the info box, such narrative discussions average three pages per town, or the equivalent of a medium-sized magazine article (no photos, though). I did feel, though, that many of these (admittedly subjective) town descriptions were quite boosterish; if any of these places is saddled with a rotten economy or a soaring crime rate, you're not likely to hear about it here. Perhaps the most useful--or at least most enjoyable--aspect of AMERICA'S 100 is its listing of ten "Top 10" towns from its ranking, using categories such as "Best Budget Towns," "Best Beach Towns," "Best College Towns," and so on. One caveat--America teems with the retired and soon-to-be retired. Therefore the housing costs in this book, which are at least four years old, may be fairly on the mark in some instances but woefully understated in others. One solution is to contact the chamber of commerce listings, where your address will inevitably be passed on to local realtors, most of whom belong to the local C of C. AMERICA'S 100 doesn't overwhelm the reader with its number of locations or hard data, but it does its best to convey the real feeling, the experience of living in each place.

100 Best Places to Retire

Excellent referral information and explicit for cost, weather, local features, and amenities