How A Newlywed Houston Couple Found A Retirement Spot—In Raleigh, N.C. |
By the time Karen White and Adrian Kasbergen met on a dating app in 2021, they had been living on opposite sides of the sprawling Houston metro area for decades, each owning their own home. They soon started talking about marrying, retiring together, and moving to another part of the country, especially since neither was crazy about Houston’s steamy summers or power failures in the winter.
But where? They both had business backgrounds (he as a marketing manager with a computer company, she as an administrator with financial and energy firms). So, of course, they started plotting data on a large spreadsheet of possible future retirement places. Their “joint spreadsheet,’’ as White calls it, had columns for median home prices, plus a lot more—cost of living, crime rates, climate factors, healthcare factors, tax rates and so on.
In some respects, it resembled the way Forbes gathered information to pick the Best Places To Retire In 2026, though our work product was a lot bigger. We looked at nearly 1,000 locales to find 25 that offer the best retirement living at an affordable price. White and Kasbergen included just a handful of places on their spreadsheet.
As an interracial couple—she is African American and he is from the Netherlands—they wanted a racially diverse place with liberal politics, so they coded that in, too. (Forbes makes note of an area’s politics in our full profiles of chosen places, but that doesn’t figure into our selection process.) The couple also wanted a thriving arts scene, something we factor into Forbes’ annual list of the Best Places To Enjoy Your Retirement, which looks at the best places to pursue various passions without regard to cost.
“We didn’t want to give up on quality of live,” says Kasbergen, now 70. The spreadsheet eventually had 29 columns. “It got pretty wide,” adds White, 64.
The result of all that........