The Biggest Financial Decision of Your Retirement Is Your Address
The same retirement can cost more than twice as much in one place as another. Almost nobody puts that number in the plan.
On New Year's Day, 1960, cars backed up for miles on a two-lane road into the Arizona desert. At the end of the road, there was barely anything. A few model homes, a shopping center, a cotton field and a golf course. And the people in the cars had gray hair, most of them over 50.
They had all descended on the desert to see the first resort-style active retirement community in the United States. The builder was planning to build 1,700 homes in the first three years. The organizers expected maybe 10,000 people that weekend. 100,000 showed up. By December, 2,000 homes were sold, and the community expanded for another eighteen years.
Social Security and postwar union pensions gave millions of Americans a paycheck that was not pinned to an address. And a new address helped solve the arithmetic for people on a fixed income.
I am often asked "How much do I need to retire?" We even built a retirement calculator that shows how long your money lasts in retirement. But the invisible question, absent from every calculator, including ours, is "retire where?"
The answer to how much depends entirely on the answer to where. The same money that lasts 10 years in one location could last 20 in another, for the same lifestyle. The difference is not the spending discipline. It is the address.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics did the math. Housing is about a third of what a couple over 65 spends in a year. Changing your address can have a major impact on this bill.
The dream is simple. Retire near the beach, rent a two-bedroom, simple activities. Maybe dine out a few nights a week, enjoy the sunset on the beach, go kayaking, hiking. Nothing remarkably over the top.
We did the math in 2026. On the San Diego coast, this lifestyle costs $8,000 a month once you count everything. About half your budget is spent on rent.
You can get the same lifestyle for about $5,000 a month if you change address to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Your rent drops to $1,700. Almost the entire saving comes from what you save in housing. And some might enjoy Myrtle Beach even more. The ocean hits 83 degrees in August, making swimming much more enjoyable compared with California's beaches, where the water is almost always cold.
You make the brave decision of venturing out of the United States. After watching some YouTube videos, you pick Phuket, Thailand. You read about the nice beaches, the good food, the developed infrastructure and how safe it is.
Depending on how you want to live, your budget might vary, but most expats agree a couple can live very comfortably on a $3,000 per month budget, even after factoring in local health coverage and an annual ticket back to the United States to visit family and friends. You can comfortably rent a modern two-bedroom near Nai Harn beach for $900.
Assume a couple in their 60s receives a typical Social Security check of about $3,000 at the full retirement age of 67. For them to live the Southern California coastal living, under the 4% rule, they need a nest egg of about $1.5 million. Changing their address to Myrtle Beach, the nest egg they need at retirement drops to $600,000. And in Phuket, Thailand, our couple can live entirely on Social Security, with arguably a better standard of living.
Put differently, assume the couple saved $1,500 a month at about 6% real return after inflation (around 9% nominally) starting at age 37. In 30 years, they have saved enough to retire in San Diego at age 67.
Had they decided to retire in Myrtle Beach instead, they could have stopped at 58, and enjoyed 9 more years of retirement when they still had more energy to enjoy life. They could have chosen to retire in Southeast Asia with a $400,000 portfolio in their early 50s, and relied on that income until Social Security kicked in later. That is 15 years they do not have to trade for a paycheck.
Kris Cunningham was a nurse in Sarasota. In 2012 she and her husband Dave moved to Panama, where they lived on a little under $1,250 a month. She was 61. "If I stayed in the States," she said, "I'd be working until I was 70."
Jameel Haiat built theme parks for Disney. He and his partner moved to Chiang Mai in 2023, and stayed through a throat cancer diagnosis and the treatment that followed. The Thai hospitals, he says, treated him like a patient instead of a dollar sign. He is turning 60, and says he has never been more creative in his life. "We wake up every day, and we don't even know what day it is. We say every day is our Saturday."
Fred Jones, a cop in Lake County, Florida, retired after 26 years in law enforcement and decided to move to Chiang Mai in 2023, where he rented a two-bedroom house for $540 a month, and lives comfortably on a $2,100 per month budget. He says he can now sit with his back to the door, something he never did as a cop, leaving all the trauma of working in law enforcement for decades behind.
For most of your life, you never pick your address. When you are a kid, you follow your parents. What college you get into dictates the city you spend your early twenties in, and the job picks your address for your working years. You come to accept your address like weather. Something that happens to you, and you accept it and adapt. In retirement, that pattern ends. For the first time, you can unpin yourself from your address. There are a lot of reasons you might not want to do it. It could be proximity to family, friends, or social connections you have built through decades. Or it could just be your habits and fear of the unknown.
That is why at retirement, while many of the hard constraints are gone, you still feel pinned to the location. The invisible strings holding you back.
The people in those cars in 1960 were not braver than you. Somebody built a town in a cotton field and made the freedom visible.
That choice is finally yours. Price it.
Sources
Sun City opening (January 1, 1960; 10,000 visitors expected and 100,000 came; 2,000 homes sold by December; the community expanded through 1978): Arizona Memory Project, "Early Years of Sun City, Arizona," and Del Webb corporate history. https://azmemory.azlibrary.gov/nodes/view/206
Housing as about a third of annual spending for households 65 and older: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Expenditure Survey. https://www.bls.gov/cex/
Typical couple Social Security benefit (aged couple, both receiving benefits: $3,208 a month in 2026, rounded down to $3,000 in this essay): Social Security Administration, 2026 COLA Fact Sheet. https://www.ssa.gov/news/en/cola/factsheets/2026.html
San Diego, Myrtle Beach, and Phuket monthly budgets: Arcanomy analysis, 2026, built from market rent listings on Zumper, RentCafe, Apartments.com, FazWaz, and Thailand-Property, Medicare premiums from CMS, and Thai expat insurance costs from Pacific Cross.
Kris Cunningham: PBS NewsHour, "Moving to paradise for cheaper retirement," September 24, 2013. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/moving-to-paradise-for-cheaper-retirement
Jameel Haiat and Hilcia Pena: Amanda Goh, Business Insider, May 2025. https://www.businessinsider.com/retire-abroad-journey-us-thailand-disney-imagineers-chiang-mai-healthcare-2025-5
Fred Jones: Amanda Goh, Business Insider, October 20, 2024. https://www.businessinsider.com/retired-florida-cop-moved-to-chiang-mai-thailand-cheaper-safer-2024-10
Ocean temperatures (Myrtle Beach about 83 degrees in August; San Diego in the 60s): seatemperature.org monthly averages. https://www.seatemperature.org/north-america/united-states/myrtle-beach-august.htm
