While eating breakfast at home, I floated the idea of having dinner in Carson City, Nevada. While scoffed at first, my wife decided that sounded like a good idea.
Carson City is one of the locations I was looking at to retire in. As many of you know, I am not a fan of California anymore and don’t want to live here any longer than I have to. We have family ties in California, so we have to look at places close to where we are now to avoid being spread out too far.
This was a 2.5 hour drive from our home near Sacramento, CA over the Sierra Nevada Mountains. I can imagine navigating this pathway in the winter might be a bit rough, but other than that the drive was very pleasant. As we pulled up to Carson City, I kept thinking this is like a mix of New Mexico and California. New Mexico dryness, and California mountains. Not much of a stretch, Nevada is in-between the two states. I had expected Carson City to be a little more green than it was.
From what I saw, Carson City has that “small town” environment where people are actually nice to each other and talk. I looked up home prices, and to my surprise, they were not that much different than California. One of my original ideas would be to capitalize on the equity of the overinflated market in California and buy cheaper in another state. Doesn’t look like this would happen in Carson City.
There seems to be all the shopping conveniences you would want, and Reno is only a half hour drive if you need to find something from a bigger city. We found a nice restaurant to eat steak, and it was good, but not worth the money we spent, around ~$130.00 for the two of us. Perhaps Reno would have been a better choice for more variety and to “kick it up” a notch.
All things considered, I don’t think I want to retire in Carson City after this brief visit. I “could” live there, but it’s not screaming my name anymore like it was in my research. Too bad we don’t border Montana, I’d move there tomorrow if it was feasible. Maybe we just by a cabin or vacation house in Montana, and keep our house in California, it will be paid for when we retire, so why not? Time will tell, still have a decade to decide.