Australia Is The Best Place To Retire
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The best place to retire is Australia. I've lived in South America and Scotland and England, but for my purposes I prefer living here in Australia.
You have an enormous choice of climate. If you are worried about getting the deadly form of skin cancer (melanoma) they have discovered that sunshine prevents it. The further North you go, the less melanoma there is, and the fewer problems there are with Alzheimers, Parkinsons, and multiple sclerosis.
They eventually worked out the reason why Tasmania is the worst place for these diseases. Sunlight gives you vitamin D. One theory is that Neanderthal man was normal homo sapiens. He just wandered North from the equator, and started feeling cold, so put on lots of clothes. As a result, he didn't get enough vitamin D from the sun, and developed the classic symptoms of vitamin D deficiency, which ignorant anthropologists decided was evidence of a different species.
However, Northern Territory, or even Queensland is too hot for my liking. Even way down South here in Perth it gets hotter than I would like, so I would like to move to Tasmania to get away from the heat.
My big worry is that I could have a health problem that would put me on life-support machines for thirty years, entirely against my will.
So my ideal place for retirement would be on a hobby farm in Tasmania. In this country a hobby farm is usually at least 40 acres, and proper farms are measured in hundreds of square miles.
I could have broadband Internet connected, and grow all my own fruit and vegetables organically, and train my own dog, and have fun writing articles like this one (yes, writing can be great fun once you discover the fun way to write). There might not be a local barbershop singing group, but most of my other hobbies would still be available to me.
The climate would be nice and cool, with fewer drought problems. Where would I get the money? My house here is worth half a million dollars, because Perth is so popular for jobs. I never moved to Tasmania, because they have massive unemployment. However, now that I am retired, I could probably find a hobby farm that would give me a lot of change from half a million dollars, and my pension would give me all the money I needed to live on.
Cod liver oil would solve the problem of vitamin D deficiency in Tasmania.
What about my big worry about the best place to retire? Well if I only see my nearest neighbor who is a mile away every few days, no helpful busybody is going to find me after a stroke or heart attack and cart me off to the life support machines.
More on Retirement for Baby Boomers
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