I’m giving really serious consideration to a move to the north-central Ozark area of Arkansas. My reasoning is that the weather is fairly benign – average temps are 40-to-80 F, good [length of] growing season; land is still pretty reasonable. Acreage at $1,000 per acre – sometimes less – is not unusual. The area has springs/lakes/creeks/caves; many smaller towns; living costs are very reasonable; a strong family orientated population; fairly well-developed medical services even in the smaller towns.
I realize that this area is more suited for people who do not work or who are not looking for work, but I’m only seven months from retirement and so far have managed to keep most of my retirement funds from tanking. I hope to have in the area of around $4,000 per month coming in to fund my retirement; and this without resorting to IRA withdrawals. I should hopefully be able to off-load my house in Florida for around $150,000 – mostly because of the location. After paying the minimal balanced owed, I hope to pretty much be able to put up ~$100,000 as purchase money. Looking through the current realtor’s ads from the area, that money could buy me anything from 50-to-80 undeveloped acres at one end, to a three bedroom house on 20-40 acres on the other end.
The biggest negative in the area appears to be that the in-place governmental infrastructure occasionally is not up to the job, a state income tax, and jobs are not very plentiful. But again for me these are really almost pluses. I plan to use trusts to handle most of my transactions there and by limiting my visible income I hope to keep pretty much off both the state and Federal radar screen. All taken together the pluses – at least from my perspective – seem to far outweigh the negatives.
I would like to build a semi-underground house on a southeast exposure to minimize heating and cooling costs as well as reducing security issues – both personal and disaster related.
A big downer there is that it is in the Mississippi earthquake zone, but sometimes you have to flip the coin, and I worry more about the caldera of Yellowstone than I do a [local]earthquake. Regards, – Doug D.