Some Retirees Are Ditching City Life for Rural America
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Here's your Money Briefing for Wednesday, September 25th. I'm J.R. Whelan for The Wall Street Journal. After seeing population declines for years, areas of rural America are seeing growth. Some people are trading expensive city life to retire in the country.
Some people find that their retirement savings goes further and last longer. Other folks just simply want to avoid traffic. They never want to get caught in gridlock again.
We'll talk to Wall Street Journal personal finance reporter Veronica Dagger about the pros and cons of retiring in rural America after the break.
Listen at schwab.com slash washingtonwise.
Some older Americans are finding they can get more for their retirement buck by moving to rural America. Wall Street Journal reporter Veronica Dagger joins me. Veronica, when we say rural areas, how far outside of cities are we talking?
For some of the folks we spoke to, they are hours outside the city, and other people were about 15 minutes outside the city. For this story, we looked at places that had lower populations. The lowest population we profiled in the story had about 500 people in the entire town. And then on the high end, we had about 7,000 people in a town in Colorado that we looked at.
500 people in the town? Where was that?
Upstate New York in the Catskills.
In the story that you and Anne wrote, you said that the move to remote mountain and lake areas is helping to reverse a downward trend in their rural population. Why had it declined?
What recent trend is prompting retirees to consider rural America?
There's several reasons it had declined. In certain areas, jobs had dried up, and so people had moved away. It was harder to find work. But from April 2020 to July 2023, the rural counties' retirees flocked to grew 4% versus less than 1% for rural America as a whole.
So what's the allure? Why are older Americans leaving cities and the suburbs for quieter country life?
Some people find that their retirement savings goes further and last longer in the country. Other folks just simply want to avoid traffic. They don't never want to get caught in gridlock again. And so moving to some rural area of Colorado, for example, will completely take traffic off the table.
And make sure the neighbor has a snowplow, too.
Right. Exactly. Or that you're up to it. Yeah.
Picking up and moving to quieter, more spread out areas can be a culture shock for some. So how did the retirees you spoke to adjust to that kind of change?
Some people tested out the area before they moved there full time. So they did some research on what would be the lowest cost area to move to. They got a sense of the amenities of the areas. And they also tested out the weather. So the weather in Gunnison, Colorado in the summer is quite different from the winter when it can be very harsh and cold and roads close down. And so they did a little practice run, so to speak.
Yeah, I would imagine the change in weather could be extreme. Anne spoke to a man who lived in Manhattan and then moved to an island off the coast of Maine.
So he was living in a very crowded city, as you know, and moved to a place where sometimes you don't see the neighbors or you have to travel by boat to get your groceries. Such a different experience than what you would have had in New York City.
You mentioned that people gauged the amenities when they were testing out these rural areas before they actually moved there. But what kind of amenities and services are not as readily available in rural areas?
It may be difficult to find a specialist. So if you're looking for medical attention and a certain specialty like an ENT or a gastro doctor isn't available in your town, you might have to travel further to get them.
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