WSJ Your Money Briefing - Some Retirees Are Ditching City Life for Rural America

Episode Date: September 25, 2024

Retirees concerned about the costs of living in cities and suburbs are moving to more rural parts of the country. Wall Street Journal reporter Veronica Dagher joins host J.R. Whalen to discuss the trade-offs involved. Sign up for the WSJ's free Markets A.M. newsletter.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

OCI is the single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. Do more and spend less like Uber, 8x8, and Databricks Mosaic. Take a free test drive of OCI at oracle.com slash wall street. Here's your money briefing for Wednesday, September 25th. I'm JR Whalen 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. AI may be the most important new computer technology ever, but AI needs a lot of processing speed and that gets expensive fast. Upgrade to the next generation of the cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or OCI. OCI is the single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. Do more and spend less like Uber,

8x8, and Databricks Mosaic. Take a free test drive of OCI at oracle.com slash Wall Street, oracle.com slash Wall Street. 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 this 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 Ann 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? 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 county's retirees flock to grew 4% versus less than 1% for rural America as a whole. So what's the allure?

Why are older Americans leaving cities in 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. Picking up and moving to quieter, more spread out areas can be a culture shock for some.

So how do 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 closed down. And so they did a little practice run, so to speak. Yeah, I would imagine the change in weather could be extreme.

Ann 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 gauge 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? LESLIE KENDRICK 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. Also a general practitioner, sometimes they're hard to get appointments with.

So you're traveling for doctors in an emergency situation, you may need to be airlifted in certain cases to get to a bigger or more specialized hospital. Other things, you might be used to having your pick of grocery stores and your pick of gas stations. If you move to one of these towns, you might just have to settle for whatever provider is there, whether it's the local Walmart or what have you. What do the people you interviewed tell you about the expenses involved in moving and the shape their personal finances were in?

A couple I spoke to who moved from Tucson, Arizona, sold their home and bought a similar sized home in Rogersville, Missouri for more than $100,000 less. And they were thrilled about that because they've got about $300,000 worth of retirement savings and they are already seeing that their savings is going much further in Missouri than it did in Arizona. They said gas and home insurance are cheaper in Missouri, certain groceries are cheaper, they are finding entertainment to be cheaper, maybe they don't have as many options, but overall they're finding ways to

adapt to this slower pace, they said, but at the same time they feel more financially set than they did in a big city. So for somebody who's listening and thinking to themselves, wow, when I retire, life in a rural town sounds pretty good. How should they get their personal finances in order to potentially make that kind of move? If you're owning a home where you currently live, if you sell that home, what will you be able to buy in the new town you're moving to?

What changes will you have to make? Will you be able to buy in the new town you're moving to? What changes will you have to make? Will you be able to get something at a lower price? Will it be set up to your liking? Trying to figure out what neighborhood within the rural area is the best fit for you. What's the best community? In addition, be ready to drive more. In general, you move to these rural areas, you have to like driving. It may be expensive to travel to other parts of the country or abroad because of where

you're located and so you need to factor in potentially higher airfare costs. That's WSJ Reporter Veronica Dagger and that's it for your money briefing. This episode was produced by Zoe Culkin with supervising producer Melanie Roy. I'm JR Whalen for the Wall Street Journal. Thanks for listening. AI may be the most important new computer technology ever, but AI needs a lot of processing speed and that gets expensive fast. Upgrade to the next generation of the cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or OCI. OCI is the single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. Do more and spend less like Uber, 8x8, and Databricks Mosaic. Take a free test drive of OCI at oracle.com slash wall street, oracle.com slash wall street.