Early Retirement Extreme Forums

Chris wrote:

Lucky C wrote:@leeholsen
So by my math, MA is actually superior than NH for ERE in terms of taxes, mainly due to the higher NH real estate tax.

I think it's highly specific to a person's income plan and living situation. If you're pulling in investment income as capital gains, NH's dividend and interest tax won't bother you. And the first $2400 of div/int income is exempted. So if you're following a total-return approach and selling off shares for income, or maybe you're in muni bonds, or other investments generating cap gains income (mutual funds, timber REITs), NH would work well from a tax perspective.

As far as RE tax, that depends on where you live. The difference in rent/property prices may outweigh the difference in RE tax. Comparing Manchester to Worcester, you could probably find equal or cheaper apartments in Manchester. But out in the sticks, I'd expect prices to be similar.

In my opinion, commuting from NH to Boston is brutal. During rush hour, 55 miles != 1 hour of driving. Not sure what you're specialty is lee, but the job market in NH is pretty good: unemployment rate at 2.6%.

yes, i cede the point to you that 55 miles into metro Boston isnt going to be an hour, i was just posting on the point of how a state's taxes can be percieved.

and i did not even include the cost of housing. which looks to be 30% higher in MA.

if you could get to boston to work from NH within an hour, it would be worth it imo; if you had a job available that you did not in NH.

Why is it every time I hear "ERE City" I think of Slab City? First saw it on the 'Into The Wild', it's an EREr's wet-dream.

P.S. That's good news about the Free State Project, it's time for libertarians to begin their exodus to the promised land!

leeholsen wrote:I looked for somewhere else to put this but did not see a place; so I put it here as I have been designating Manchester, NH as my ERE city and it was initially one of the primary ERE cities.

I was looking at commutting to Boston from Manchester just in case my finances in ERE took a header and I needed to get a job again and Boston would have the better job market and it is 55 miles one way; so I was going to look into boston housing until I checked the state tax rates and NH is zero while MA is 6.25%.

So I did the math and it would actually be cheaper to live in NH and commute(if you do not include the commutting time as a cost) than live in Boston with any income over around 25K as if you have a 50MPG prius and commuted 48 weeks a year on $3 per gallon; your year costs would be about $1500 which is what you would pay in takes at 6.25%. and it would be also cheaper to live in NH at 40k and cummte if gas was $5; something it has never reached in the usa.

I just found it interesting.

I agree with Lucky that commuting to Boston would be brutal. The emotional/stress cost of commuting should be factored in that equation in addition to money.

I live in Boston(Cambridge) and the car traffic is awful. The roads are terrible with constant construction. I bike and walk mostly to local places for work, errands, etc.

NH is known to have very high real estate taxes if you're buying a house there....It seems that renting a place and working within NH would be your best ideal to maximize your dollar. Portsmouth, NH is an area that I like a lot.

I read through this whole thread and can't believe Maine hasn't been mentioned. In terms of New England that would be my pick over NH in a heartbeat. They have an income tax but property taxes are much lower, and income taxes not bad if keep income low. House prices are low in ME (outside of Portland and Southern Coastal ME), rent is low, huge amount of beautiful natural lakes, tons of rugged coastline, tons of quaint towns with colonial architecture (some towns dating back to early 1600's), university towns, nice mountains inland, drop dead gorgeous falls. Freezing cold & LONG winter though + lots of snow, but a lot more winter sunshine than the dark and gloomy but mild Pacific Northwest winters. May 15th-late Oct is a slice of heaven in Maine (or Vermont my 2nd fav NE state). No big cities in ME, mostly small or mid sized town living. I was not a big fan of Portland ME (my least favorite and most expensive part of the state but the biggest city).

Some of the great legends of frugality were and are Maine residents (for good reason!)....Jim Merkel author of "Radical Simplicty", Amy Dacyczyn's author of "Tightwad Gazette", and THE original back to the land-ers Scott and Helen Nearing author of "The Good Life".

I hear WA State mentioned here a lot. I live north of Seattle right now. This is a great place to live for many reasons (mountains, lakes, forests, islands, salt water, NO income tax, temperate climate, low electricity costs, low heating costs, NO cooling costs) BUT it is exploding in growth. Seattle is becoming SF Bay Area 2.0. very quickly. And home prices and rents are skyrocketing in the Seattle metro (and they are getting high in Vancouver, Bellingham, Tacoma, Olympia, Everett too). Traffic is brutal from Everett to Olympia. The state added 500,000 people in the last 5 years (Maine hasn't added 500k people in the last 70 yrs!). There are rural areas that are lower cost, but towns like Centralia, Aberdeen, etc... have a fairly economically depressed feel, not much to do, with few numbers of educated people.

One of the nice things about some other areas of the U.S. (midwest, rust belt, northeast) like Maine, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, etc... is precisely that they are NOT growing in population or changing so much. After living in CA for 25 yrs and Seattle area for 4 I am TIRED of the exploding growth, brutal traffic, skyrocketing rents and housing prices.

I like Oregon but the income tax is a deal killer and house prices are not super cheap either (Maine is cheaper). OR is also growing pretty fast. And OR income tax is not on a sliding scale like places like ME and VT. OR you pay 9% even if you make $30k a year AGI. In VT and ME taxation % rate falls the less money you make both income and property tax (VT) (use this site to estimate your tax burden....http://www.paycheckcity.com/calculator/salary/).

I haven't been but Buffalo and Pittsburgh seem interesting due to low cost of housing, Pitt has a nice hilly topography than many Midwest places don't have, lots of colleges to bring life to area. I have not been to Cleveland or Milwaukee either but I'm curious because of cheap housing + access to amenities of those cities.

South Dakota has a GREAT combination of no state income tax, low house prices, and low property taxes. That is a combo that is very hard to find (except maybe WY). Perhaps the college towns of Vermillon SD or Brookings SD (I have not been). Rapid City SD has more sun and the black hills are nice, but its pretty isolated and have not heard a lot of good things about it.

I proposed Brookings upthread. My friend that lives there calls it a bit of liberal MN in SD. Vermilion is pretty small maybe 10,000. Neither win any awards as the prettiest.

Rapid is still pretty far from the prettiest parts of the Hills. Its a better RV summer location.

The philosophy of getting like-minded individuals into the same area has come up many times. Relatively recent was the free state project which “voted” to get independent minded folks to move to New Hampshire.

Acting on our own, on retirement we moved to the city of Tucson, Arizona. “Great” for independent minded retirees, no. Ok, yes. Services are here. If you keep to yourself, you are left alone. In the right home, your heat/cooling costs are not bad. It rains, enough that if collected it can provide for a modest garden. Regarding firearms Arizona essentially respects the US Constitution.

MMM's newest post decries the problems of suburbia. Nestled in the middle if the post:

One of my life goals is that we – quite literally you and me – build a city like this here in the USA.

Interesting. Perhaps the ideal ERE City is yet to be built.

tylerrr wrote: ↑

Mon Jul 25, 2016 4:44 pm

leeholsen wrote:I looked for somewhere else to put this but did not see a place; so I put it here as I have been designating Manchester, NH as my ERE city and it was initially one of the primary ERE cities.

I was looking at commutting to Boston from Manchester just in case my finances in ERE took a header and I needed to get a job again and Boston would have the better job market and it is 55 miles one way; so I was going to look into boston housing until I checked the state tax rates and NH is zero while MA is 6.25%.

So I did the math and it would actually be cheaper to live in NH and commute(if you do not include the commutting time as a cost) than live in Boston with any income over around 25K as if you have a 50MPG prius and commuted 48 weeks a year on $3 per gallon; your year costs would be about $1500 which is what you would pay in takes at 6.25%. and it would be also cheaper to live in NH at 40k and cummte if gas was $5; something it has never reached in the usa.

I just found it interesting.

I agree with Lucky that commuting to Boston would be brutal. The emotional/stress cost of commuting should be factored in that equation in addition to money.

I live in Boston(Cambridge) and the car traffic is awful. The roads are terrible with constant construction. I bike and walk mostly to local places for work, errands, etc.

NH is known to have very high real estate taxes if you're buying a house there....It seems that renting a place and working within NH would be your best ideal to maximize your dollar. Portsmouth, NH is an area that I like a lot.

well, Manchester NH and there by the entire state is out as Manchester was the only place of interest to me.

Living in Houston and Dallas for so long, Manchester was just too small; the greater Boston area still looks good or maybe in Rhode Island.

I understand living costs and housing may be greater, but I need a relative large city or metro area to hold my interest; even if I'm living extremely frugually in it.

I hear you, it will be hard to leave a bit city area initially. I've lived in big areas for twenty years while saving money the entire time and living frugally.

I've been compiling certain data in an excel file.

Here's the file, as of today:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RWJoWb ... sp=sharing

The list below are the criteria I've been updating. It can be a lot of work to find data and then to match it up with how the cities are grouped, so often I only do it for cities in regions I may be interested in.

• (metro area) population
• % population growth since 2010

• Altitude
• Weather - Average high and low temperatures in January, April, July, and October
• Weather - Inches of total precipitation per year
• Weather - Inches of snow per year
• Weather - average % humidity
• Weather - #rainy days per year
• Weather - hours of sunlight per year
• Weather - clear days per year

• Demographics - population % by race
• Demographics - % population age 25-44
• Demographics - ratio of females to males

• Economic - Median Income - Household
• Economic - Median income - per capita
• Economic - % Poverty

• % With H.S. education
• % With bachelors

• Crime rate - (Wikipedia city info)
• Crime rate - (From FBI chart)

• % "Bible Minded"
• % Favoring same sex marriage
• % with Conservative political ideology

• Real Estate Prices - Median(?) List Price
• Real Estate Prices - Median(?) Close price
• Real Estate Prices - avg. $ per square foot
• Real Estate Prices - estimated median(?) home square footage

There are plenty of things not on the list. Many are because I don't care much about them (eg: state income tax) and some because I didn't think of them while making it (eg: property tax rates).

Wow. Very cool. Thank you.

Do you currently have your under consideration cities listed in order of preference?

No. As uploaded, most of the cities are currently sorted by avg cost per square foot. Plus there are some groups down below separate by blank rows - maybe groups of cities I wasn't considering or wasn't updating

Just make a scoring function and sort according to that or those. Everybody can make their own.

Has anyone seen this yet? MMM planning a city in CO!

https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonrei ... 7334d4d91d

I'm not the only one who played too much cities skylines apparently.

The older parts of Dutch cities built before modern urban planning are much more attractive than the current woonerf type neighborhoods.

As a Dutch expat that isn't a fan of (Southern) American city-planning the idea is tempting, but I see very little from the company behind it that is inspiring me to believe they can pull anything like this off. Mostly looks like they have a lot of concepts and the most rudimentary 3D models.

It's not a great indicator when most of the publicity/news coverage they have is simply regarding their interaction with MMM rather than their accomplishments.

I've been thinking about how the past couple of years has reshaped my idea of what makes for a good ERE-style location. The general community, local officials, and state officials response to the pandemic makes where I am now look pretty good. Though when fire season rolls back around, it will probably seem less so—if I didn't have family in the area, evacuations last year would have been horrendous. All said, I'd rather be in a situation where I could be more self-sufficient wrt food, water, energy and free of what a landlord is willing to agree to. But the regions of cheap housing look quite a bit less appealing now than they ever did.

Have you changed your opinions about any particular locales as being ERE-friendly?

@2birdsonestone

Very cool. I remember MMM floating this idea a few years ago but stated he really didn't have the energy for being behind such a big project. Maybe retirement has given him that energy and spark.

@tsch - Not at such. The areas I had marked out all have functional governments which turns out to be important when federal leadership is failing and decisions have to be made closer to home. Admittedly, that was not something I weighted directly for before although indirectly, I already did consider a general lack of civic-mindedness a deal breaker. A proxy for this (and even an extra factor) would be which states are maker states for federal dollars and which are taker states.