Where to Retire?
I needed to find a map of the Big Island and all of the subdivisions. I went online and found what I was looking for. Then it occurred to me, I don’t know the first thing about living in Hawai’i and I don’t know the neighborhoods nor the weather patterns. It is very frustrating when you want to find out information on a neighborhood but you don’t know where to find it. Even the Internet does not have good solid information on these subdivisions. Oh well, I shelved the idea for a while.
We purchased our next investment property in Arizona. It was at this point that we received a recommendation to re-fi our current home and buy one more property. My wife and I discussed this possibility and we decided that the next house should be where we want to retire. For many months we discussed several areas that appealed to us. We talked about staying in SoCal since our friends and family are here. We decided we had enough of SoCal. We discussed Northern California as well as New Mexico and the Las Vegas area.
Even though my wife doesn’t like the heat we talked seriously about Vegas because my union had built some low cost housing for retirees there and it looked like some place we could really afford. At this point it was early 2005 and we had not been to Las Vegas for many years prior. Boy, did we get a rude awakening when we went there for 3 days! It was not only built up much more than we were last there but they were building out just like SoCal and it was scary. Not only that but the one ugly thing about SoCal when you fly in is the brown haze that covers everything. When we drove into Las Vegas I saw that familiar brown haze only it was worse!
That basically left New Mexico (my wife’s preference) and Northern California (my preference). We studied the New Mexico areas for a while and found that the popular retirement areas were built up accordingly in the areas we were interested in. So we turned to Northern California and found that there was still pristine areas we could afford to live in that were not too built up. Believe it or not it was mid 2005 and by the time we re-financed and started looking seriously through the MLS listings we found the affordable places were no longer within our price range.
By this time I was feeling a little dimayed. We could afford another home in early 2005 and now where we were looking to buy was out of our reach 6 months later. One night I was just cruising the Net when I found the Hawai’i MLS Listing site. So I starting searching for houses expecting to see beautiful out of reach properties. I started looking on Oahu and realized I was looking at SoCal all over again. It made no sense to me to move to Oahu when it was so much like where I wanted to leave. So I started looking on Maui and Kauai. It didn’t take long to see that there was not much available for under $1 Million on Maui. What was available was a 1 bedroom condo with a mountain view, not even an ocean view! Looking through the Kauai listings was a mixed bag. While there were very old homes that needed work within our price range the new houses being built at the time were coming in just within our reach. But they would not be ready for quite a few months down the road. Then I started to think about living on Kauai. I am not one that needs a lot of things or to be constantly entertained. But let’s face it, Kauai is a very small island with few roads. To be honest, I feel it is by far the most beautiful of the islands but for me I just could not envision myself living there. I think it is just a little too remote for my taste.
That is when it dawned on me, I am SO DUMB! The big island is my favorite island yet I was not even dreaming of buying a home there. So I started searching the MLS listings and OMG!
To be continued…
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