Spotlight: real estate mogul Barbara Corcoran
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The "Aging in Placers" seem to be more typical, and yet even they are changing what we think of as retirement, right?

Where do you fit?

• Fire sale in Florida. • The Huddlers. • The Zoomers. • The Ruppies. • The Boomerangs. • Aging in Placers. • Graviting to youth. • Favorite places abroad. • A place of purpose. • 3 favorite spots.

I found that almost a quarter of the population had no intention of leaving where they were, but how do you make where you are new all over again? I tell the story about very close friends of mine who retired early, they were 56. They had the financial wherewithal to continue owning their large four-bedroom house outside of New York City, but what they opted to do was really wise. They sat down and analyzed what was most important to them, and what came first was family and friends. They knew that. But on the other hand, they're both sailors, they only took a week vacation a year to sail. So what they did is, they downsized their large home, bought a very small, inexpensive home one town over so they're still close to all their family and friends, with its own dock on Long Island Sound. So they were able to put money in their pocket, get a smaller house, and now they're renovating it in a very sexy way but with all the bells and whistles for older people, so they don't plan on ever leaving that house. They're living their dream. Boy, did they do it right.

You caution retirees to make financially secure moves by moving to an area with a growing number of young people. Why?

Youth is everything. The quickest way to size up an area is to look at how young it is. It might be very fashionable to think of retirement as moving in with a lot of other people your age, but the problem with that is it ages and ages, and is labeled as old, period. You don't have any replenishment of the waters. The quickest way is to go to the Chamber of Commerce and simply ask how many jobs are being created and how many are being lost. If there are more being created than lost, you've got a youthful population because there are jobs to be had. If you're really lazy and don't want to make that call, all you do is coast around the area you're thinking of buying in and simply do a headcount on the new cars. Young people buy new cars. Just look around at how many middle-priced new cars are in the shopping mall and you've got yourself a winner if there's a disproportionate number of new cars, because you're retiring to a young person's area.