Retire in Vegas for clean, quiet neighborhoods, mountain vistas, great weather and an inexpensive, easy-to-navigate lifestyle perfectly suited to retirees
- Easy to visit and easy to retire in Vegas
- Multiple retirement communities
- Mountains, desert and Lake Mead
By Hal DeKeyser
What’s the best place in America to spend the rest of your life? Would you retire in Vegas? What bullet points fit under that “best place” description? Is it sunny days, proximity to family, what things cost?
Getting away from something?
All are reasonable considerations, and there are more. You might want to have a great airport so traveling is easy and cheap, or have piney wood mountains nearby, or a waterfront place to enjoy the splash or surf near your feet.
Traditional Sun Belt retirement choices
The traditional retirement states are in the Sun Belt – Arizona, Nevada, Florida, Texas and California. All have their own pluses and minuses, and it’s up to you and your circumstances to determine where you should live out your freedom years.
I’m familiar with the criteria retirees use when they want to move to warm weather.
For several years, I was the newspaper publisher in America’s original retirement community – at the Daily News-Sun in Sun City, Arizona. That gave me the opportunity to talk with retirees from across the country about what triggered their post-work living choices and what they wound up liking and not. I also had seen my parents go through those checklists, and now I’m marking my own boxes about whether to retire in Vegas.
Some of the deciding factors are purely emotional or comfort-driven – where family lives and where we’ve “always called home.” Others are more empirical or feature-driven. I can’t help with the former. But even if you wind up staying “back home” because that’s where the easy groove comfort is (despite those numbing winters and/or high taxes), it’s certainly worth looking at the real nuts and bolts, the cost of living, the services and things to do available in different areas.
- When Sun City, Arizona opened its doors in the dawning hours of 1960, most retirees didn’t live much past their 60s. A few years of golf, shuffleboard and card clubs seemed like a deserved reward for the hard years of building business, defending the nation, raising a family and taking care of the responsibilities of life.
Longer, healthier, more fun and engaging retirement years
Now, we live much longer, healthier and more actively. Making money last that long is much more important – make that essential. Fewer people count on the kids to take care of us, or the Grim Reaper to call us home before the savings run out.
Yes, the “Golden Years” isn’t just a reversion to summer when you were 12. More and more people want to remain engaged in business, civic, community, sports, arts, politics, and learning. More want to find a place that not only attracts them and allows them to live comfortably with their money, but also engages them and drives them and keeps them healthy jand alive in the world, around good people, good times, and a good home.
While, of course, allowing ample opportunity to spoil the grandkids.
By virtue of the book title, it should be no surprise that I believe that the desert Southwest offers the most bullet point features that provide that lifestyle, that it’s a good idea to retire in Vegas. This book is designed to lay that out for people who are still considering where to spend their years after “normal” work cycles come to a close.
Why retire in Las Vegas
Nevada, and Las Vegas specifically, offers great opportunity, resources and cost-effective living for a great percentage of retirees to have a marvelous lifestyle during these years. It’s not for everyone, of course, and this guide is designed to help you make your own determinations about what’s important in your life. But do so with real, solid information.
And that’s what is presented in these blogs, and it the accompanying free book – “RetireNV – Warm weather, low taxes and costs, great housing and thing to do make Las Vegas a perfect retirement home.”(Click here to get the book.)
The American Southwest, and specifically the warm deserts of Arizona and Nevada, seems like it was designed for today’s retirees. Phoenix and Las Vegas were the blueprint for modern retirement living. They continue to be, and for good reasons.
I believe, when you consider a reasonable checklist of features you’d like and the environment you’d like to retire in, you’ll find the desert Southwest offer an excellent place to call home. For so many of us, it’s the best.
If it’s family, finances or fear of unfamiliarity that’s keeping you where you’ve spent most of your life, you probably are planted. If so, we still invite you to visit the warm desert now and again if for nothing more than to soothe your chilly bones and relax your spirit. Who knows? Maybe it will grow on you.
But if you actively are considering a change of place and looking for a warm retirement in a low-cost and robust environment, I urge you to consider our fair locale. I think you’ll love it.
And, in a series of blogs and a book you can get free, I’m going to tell you why I think it’s a good idea for many to retire in Vegas.
See the entire RetireNV series:
- RetireNV: Why retire in Vegas – Lifestyle, cost of living, weather
- RetireNV: Why Dad opted to move to Vegas – a retirement checklist
- RetireNV: Las Vegas’ low cost of living
- RetireNV: Great Vegas weather in the warm Mohave Desert
- RetireNV: So many Vegas things to do outdoors and indoors
- RetireNV: Getting around – easy Vegas traffic and airport
- RetireNV: Vegas 55+ retirement communities
Click here to get your free RetireNV book