25 Best Places To Enjoy Your Retirement In 2023: Traverse City And Other Top Spots

15.09.2023 - 12:09 / forbes.com

Terry and Al Hershey can afford to live anywhere they please after their successful careers—she in the corporate offices of Time Warner, he running businesses in medical device manufacturing and contract research and development. So, when they loaded up their 34-foot RV at their Bonita Springs, Florida home and hit the road to scout a second retirement locale, they headed to what might sound like a surprising place: Traverse City, Michigan, a small town (population 16,000) 250 miles northwest of Detroit, that sits on a bay opening to Lake Michigan. In 2021, the Hersheys moved into a 132-year-old, 5-bedroom Victorian three blocks from Grand Traverse Bay, where they spend six months a year with their goldendoodle and Aussiedoodle. Now both 76, they hike, bike, kayak and motorboat and can choose from scores of musical performances a year at the nearby Interlochen Center for the Arts and by the Traverse Symphony Orchestra. “We wanted a summer base,” Terry explains. Why not spend all year in Traverse City? They don’t mind the cold (they lived for many years in Colorado), but find the lack of sunshine during the winters in Traverse City too dreary, she says.

It's a nice problem to have. Those affluent Baby Boomers and Gen Xers who have plenty saved for retirement still need to plan—if they’re to make the most out of what could be decades of leisure. One approach is to move to a place (or a couple of places) that fit their interests. That’s what John and Terry Fish did this year when they moved to Bend, Oregon, a growing town of 107,000, known for its outdoors lifestyle. Back in 2019, after John, now 57, and Teri, now 53, took early retirement, they moved from Washington D.C. (where he was a lobbyist, and she a Congressional staffer) to Sullivan’s Island, S.C., across the harbor from Charleston. Why another retirement move now? “We were ready for a new adventure,” John says. Neither the Fishes nor the Hersheys have children, which adds to the freedom they feel to move anywhere they like.

Except these couples aren’t going just anywhere. Traverse City, Bend and yes, Charleston, too, are all on Forbes’ list of 25 Best Places To Enjoy Your Retirement In 2023. This is the seventh time we’ve produced this list, which identifies great places to pursue seven distinct passions: arts/culture, fine dining, lifelong learning, volunteering, outdoor activities on water, outdoor activities on land, and golf. All 25 of our picks are below, in alphabetical order.

In contrast to our annual Best Places To Retire list, which features 25 sites offering great retirement living at an affordable price, neither high living costs nor high taxes disqualify candidates from this passion-centric list. But we do note those costs on each