What’s the Blues scene like? Is Brad Cordle still performing around there?
For its property taxes and general proximity to Omaha, yes. I’m not about to dispute that that’s all Fremont has going for it. Substitute Bennington, Elkhorn, La Vista, Ralston, Nebraska City, Louisville, Plattsmouth, etc. if you like.
Except that I suspect the cost of living in most Nebraska towns is at least as low as it is here in Omaha. Since the OP wants cheap as well as safe, that gives the more rural areas the win, as long as they aren’t TOO rural. (It’s pretty clear the OP has no idea what extremely rural areas are like, so I’d hardly recommend he live in any of them.)
That’s why I suggested it. Not TOO small, not TOO far from “civilization,” has a local hospital and some decent shopping and amenities (including high speed internet in at least some areas), and the property prices and taxes aren’t too high. Since our OP seems interested in owning some land (he asked about houses on a 1 acre lot), a town like that anywhere in the great middle of the US might suit him. It all comes down to his tolerance for small town living, though.
What you’re looking for is Oregon. Every mid-sized town is near a college campus, plenty of natural beauty, hospitals everywhere, and even the “bad” neighborhoods are pretty tame. Cost of living is low here because salaries are low, but if you’re retired that doesn’t matter.
Washington State would also be worth investigating. Really, the OP is spoiled for choice; he’ll just have to decide what climate and amenities suit him best. There are more great options than we could ever discuss in this thread!
In theory, Kansas City, MO has a relatively high crime rate (although, like every place, it’s a matter of high crime rates in specific neighborhoods). But housing is comparatively cheap in Kansas City it’s self - the expensive areas are the suburbs. There are top notch medical facilities, universities and cultural facilities.
What makes it worth moving there?
The INTERNET BABY!
Google Fiber!
1 GIGABIT UP and DOWN for $70 a month! That, plus all HD cable TV for $120 a month.
$350k, must be a nice place. Good for you. Even though I have not done the math yet I’m thinking that might end up being out of the price range if we need to live off of savings until social security is available. I am guessing without doing the math again, that a place for around $150k might be the sweet spot. Lucky for us, we have never been into expensive activities like constant traveling on vacations.
A friend told me about airbnb.com and it might be a good low-cost thing to go visit those places for few days that make the short list and see what we think.
Thanks for mentioning that about medical. We were watching on cable Aerial America, which for those of you that don’t know is a show on the Smithsonian channel which has fly-overs in a helicopter of just about every state. I admit the show makes most places look very nice, and it quickly makes you forget about concerns of access to medical.
Likewise there are people who lived their whole live in major cities like New York City and never been a victim of a crime. It has to do with learning the areas and knowing what situations to stay away from. We are used to living in safe areas all our lives so we want to keep it that way, especially when as I initially mentioned you see these “cheap” areas to live with $10k homes which are crack houses in places you wouldn’t even want to drive on the street in. So it’s very hard to just go on price, cause it doesn’t tell the whole story. A $100k house in one area might be a very high crime area, where another $100k house might be in a very safe area of the US.
Finding the perfect package is hard, so I decided to approach it by doing evaluations based on costs and also by assigning number values to rank each element of importance to us. That’s really key, what is important to us. That’s one of the problem with those news articles that do rankings is they aren’t custom and focus on factors as a plus we don’t care about while ignoring what’s important to us.
There is cost, safety, medical and then the other elements such as what we might like about the town. One place might have something we discover we really like which puts it at the front of the list. Then take all this in a spreadsheet and sort by the fields to see how it all looks.
One of the things I have learned about retiring planning in terms of the financial part is that you should reevaluate the financial part of your retirement every few years and/or when your financial situation changes such as a loss of job, huge expenses or investments are doing better than expected.
I believe we are willing to have a smaller home and only one bath than two, for example, if everything else is ideal and that makes it affordable. What I don’t want to have happen is we move to do this and something was overlooked and end up having to go back to work in an area which most likely doesn’t have employment opportunities, which is why it was so inexpensive to begin with. Like now, we have a 3 bedroom house, but one of the bedrooms was really a guest room but ended up just being a dressing room for my wife. And the real reason for that was, she gets up much earlier to go to work than I do, and it would disturb me in the morning with her having clothes in our bedroom by her moving around while I sleep. But if we retire early, she won’t be waking up sooner than me so the real reason to have a dressing room for her won’t be critical. As for the guess room, it turns out that the majority of the time when people come to visit they are staying in a hotel anyway.
Exactly. We live in Chicago, and there are members of a Mexican gang living on our block (if one goes by their dress and haircuts and the graffiti in the alley). But they’ve never been a problem for us. When we walk past them, we say “Hi” just as we would any other neighbor. Why would be live here? Because we were specifically looking for a cheap area. We have a 3 bedroom apartment with a huge living room in a 2-flat for $950 a month. If this place were in a “nice” neighborhood, it would be twice that, at a minimum.
That’s absolutely something you should do. And visit at the crappiest time of year! You don’t want to move to a new place only to discover you simply can’t stand the winters, or the summers, or the constant rain, etc.
That’s a good reminder to find the worst time of the year to visit. Another reason is that everything is great when you are on vacation it seems. I think staying in the area nearest to the community we would consider is the best bet. Staying in a nice hotel far away from it doesn’t give the real story. I visited a friend who works in Las Vegas. He lived in a suburb far away from the strip. It looked like any other suburb in the US to us, and wouldn’t be surprised if there are people who move there simply because they had a great time associated with the place because they partied there.
I’ve never lived in an area where there was gang activity, at least that was known about. Although most police departments monitor some kind of gang activity in their precinct in the US. I guess the thing to do is go by police reports of the specific area.
Years ago, I use to have a radio scanner and would listen to police radio for the places we lived. It revealed activity in places we weren’t aware of. City planning or developer planning sometimes lends certain areas to attract more crime.
I’ll throw Oklahoma City’s hat into the ring. Cost of living is well below average. Housing prices are well below average - $300,000 there will get you a small McMansion. Medical care and internet are fine. For the most part, it’s a safe city and the suburbs are exceptionally safe.
The biggest issue is the extreme weather. Right now it’s 10 degrees although that is really exceptionally cold. So cold in fact that OKC schools closed because of it. In the summer, days over 100 are not uncommon.
I knew a retired couple who lived in Ashland, OR. It didn’t seem that cheap, but I’m sure it depends on where you live. Come to think of it, they bought property and had a house built so that’s got to be more expensive. I do remember OR being beautiful!
Dennison is quite a drive from Omaha. If you want to be on the Iowa side of the river I’d go with Red Oak, Harlan, or Atlantic. They all have the small town charm while being closer to Omaha/Council Bluffs.
Apex, NC recently made Money’s top ten, and it’s less expensive than Cary, a frequent Money flier. If Apex is too expensive, you can check out Holly Springs or Fuquay-Varina (pronounced “fyoo-quay,” btw). If you don’t have to worry about a commute, there’s not much drawback to living in either of those areas. You could also check out Durham-adjacent places like Bahama (“Ba-hay-ma”). Property values are at least 2/3 cheaper than the northeast, there’s fantastic medical care all over the place, it’s high-tech and fairly metropolitan (and liberal) compared to the rural parts of the state. You can have broadband and UPS delivery, and even drive to the Triangle cities for some culture if you like. It’s easy to drive to the coast, the mountains, and D.C., and perfectly feasible to drive to New York or Florida. Weather is 4-season, but light on the winter. Cars last forever without salt on the roads to rot the undercarriage.
Ashland is a bit more expensive than other cities in Oregon, might be all that highfalutin Shakespeare.
Places where the cities don’t have snow plows? I’ve never seen one except on tv.
Forbes put Des Moines as it’s top place to live for career purposes, the Today show just featured it as the best place for regular people (whatever those are - presumably middle-class folks) to live richly, crime is low, unemployment is low, cost of living is 10% below national average, there is a lot of support for arts, entertainment, sports, and education, the weather is better than Minneapolis and Chicago, and so on. I’m a southern California native who moved here in 200 and life improved dramatically for my husband and me in every way. It’s really a beautiful city as well. Part of me is sorry it is getting so much national notice. Oh, and Iowa in general is pretty middle of the road politically, Steve King notwithstanding. We seem to have a larger percentage of the old school fiscal conservative, socially liberal Republicans and mostly polite dialogue between left & right.