Blog > The 10 BIGGEST Mistakes People Make When Retiring To Colorado (& how to avoid them)
The 10 BIGGEST Mistakes People Make When Retiring To Colorado (& how to avoid them)
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10 Biggest Mistakes Retirees Make Moving to Colorado
Retiring to Colorado sounds dreamy, but after 15 years helping retirees relocate along the Front Range, I've seen costly mistakes that ruin the move. Here are the top 10 to avoid.
Key Takeaways
- Colorado costs run 10-15% higher than most US states, so budget conservatively.
- Budget 1-2% of home value annually for Colorado maintenance and weather wear.
- Renting 3-6 months first prevents buying the wrong house in the wrong neighborhood.
- Foothills homes look close on maps but add 20-30 minutes of mountain driving.
- Vacation spots like Vail or Breckenridge rarely make great full-time retirement homes.
Video Chapters
How much does it really cost to retire in Colorado?
Colorado runs 10-15% more expensive than most of the country, and home maintenance alone costs 1-2% of the property value every year.
The emotional pull of moving here is real. The Continental Divide sits in my backyard, and that view sells itself. But emotion is what gets retirees into trouble.
Before you commit, open a spreadsheet and list every monthly expense you have today: groceries, utilities, transportation, healthcare, insurance. Then add 25% on top to account for Colorado pricing. That cushion isn't pessimism, it's accuracy.
For the home itself, plan on 1-2% of the purchase price annually for upkeep. A $1 million house here means $10,000 to $20,000 a year in roof repairs, furnace work, exterior painting, and landscaping. Our weather is hard on homes. Sun, snow cycles, hail, and dry air all chew through materials faster than most retirees expect coming from milder climates.
Should I prioritize mountain views or convenience in retirement?
Most retirees regret choosing views over access after about 5 years, when daily driving to healthcare and shopping becomes a burden.
Twenty years ago you might have wanted seclusion. In retirement, your priorities shift. You're not running kids around anymore, but you are running yourself to doctor appointments, the grocery store, restaurants, and the airport when family visits.
The neighborhoods with the best views in Colorado are almost always the least accessible. Foothills communities trade convenience for scenery. That tradeoff feels worth it on day one. By year five, when you're driving 30 minutes one way for a specialist, it doesn't.
Access also affects whether people actually visit you. If you're far off I-70 or the main arteries, friends and family heading to ski country will pass you right by. Living near a main throughway keeps you connected to both your own life and the people who want to see you.
Where is the best healthcare in the Denver metro area?
The Denver metro has some of the best neurological surgeons and specialized care programs in the country, concentrated mostly along the I-25 corridor.
Healthcare access is a huge advantage of retiring here, but only if you live close enough to use it. The metro area has world-class hospitals, specialists, and rehab facilities. Foothills towns like Evergreen do not.
Evergreen is a classic trap. On a map it looks close to I-70. In reality you snake and weave 6 to 8 miles of mountain road, and a trip to a Denver hospital can run 45 minutes to over an hour, longer in snow. You can literally see the town from certain viewpoints and still be 20 minutes from your front door.
When I do discovery sessions with clients, we map healthcare access against where they want to live. As you age, that drive time matters more every year. Plan for the version of yourself that will exist in 10 or 15 years, not just today.
What is Colorado weather actually like for retirees?
Colorado averages 300 days of sunshine and 15% humidity, but snowstorms hit from October through May, sometimes with 4 seasons in a single day.
If you're coming from Florida, Arizona, or Southern California, the seasonality shift here is real. Yes, the sunshine is famous. Yes, the dry air makes 90 degrees feel comfortable and 30 degrees feel like sweater weather. But winter is winter.
We get heavy snow as early as October and as late as May. In the high country, expect snow patches into July. The transitions are abrupt. It's not unusual to start a day at 70 degrees and end it shoveling.
When you tour homes, pay attention to which direction the property faces. North-facing driveways and walkways in foothills neighborhoods build up snow mounds that take weeks to melt. South-facing lots clear themselves. On the flat plains of metro Denver, exposure matters less. Up in the foothills or anywhere with elevation, it can decide whether winter is manageable or miserable.
Should I rent before buying a retirement home in Colorado?
Renting for 3 to 6 months in your target area is the single best move retirees can make to avoid buying the wrong home.
Lifestyle fit is the hardest thing to assess from out of state. You don't know what the neighbors are like, what the HOA actually enforces, whether the pickleball court is welcomed or banned for noise, or what the average age of residents is.
A midterm furnished rental or long-term Airbnb gives you real feedback. You drive the commute. You feel the seasons. You walk the streets and talk to neighbors. You figure out if you actually want a quiet 55-plus community or a neighborhood full of young families.
This also helps you right-size the house. I've watched retirees commit to homes that are way too big or way too small because they fell in love with the location first. Foothills homes facing the Denver skyline are almost all 4,000+ square feet and $1.5M+. Castle Pines runs large. Summit County at a $1M budget will not get you 4,000 square feet. Rent first, learn the inventory, then buy.
Is it a mistake to retire where you vacationed in Colorado?
The number one mistake I see is retirees buying in Vail, Aspen, Breckenridge, or Keystone based on vacation memories rather than full-time living conditions.
Vacation life and full-time life are different sports. I go to the mountains every couple weeks to ski and hike, and I love it. I would never live on the slopes in Breckenridge. The tourist chaos, the seasonal crowds, the cost, the limited services. It's exhausting as a permanent address.
If mountain living is the goal, look at places like Silverthorne, 10 to 15 minutes outside the resort towns. You get more space, more locals, fewer tourists, and better access to grocery stores and services.
The same trap exists on the Front Range. Vacationing in central Denver and living there full-time are not the same experience. Visit your target area in different seasons, different times of day, and different days of the week. A neighborhood that's charming on a Saturday in July can feel completely different on a Tuesday in February.
Full Video Transcript
Full transcript from this video, organized by chapter. Click any timestamp to jump to that moment in the video.
Common Retirement Mistakes
[0:00] I've unfortunately watched retirees make mistakes costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars, even millions, because they haven't taken into consideration what I'm about to share with you. And these are things that I have seen over the last 15 years helping lots of people relocate here to Colorado along the Front Range. So, in this video, I want to share with you the top 10 biggest mistakes I see retirees make.
[0:21] And number one probably isn't what you think. You know, it's easy to get caught up in the emotion of moving to Colorado. We are one of the best places in the world. I mean, I'm a few minutes from my house and that's the Continental Divide behind me. It literally is in our backyard. And depending on where you're looking at, it might honestly be in your front yard, too. Uh, but it is more expensive here. You know, it's 10 to 15% more than just about anywhere else in the country except for a few places. But that is for good reason. So, during this emotional thing of moving here, uh, maybe you've got some family members here, you know, it's real easy to stay with the excitement. But what I want you to do is apply some logic here. I want you to get out a spreadsheet and I want you to track all of your current expenses and add a good 25% to it just to be safe. Your grocery bills, your utilities, uh transportation, health care costs, everything that you spend on a monthly basis. And then what I want you to do is when you're looking at the house that you're going to live in, uh depending on the price point, I want you to put in 1 to 2% max on how much maintenance costs is going to go into that house every single year. So if you're looking at a million-doll house, spec in 10 to $20,000 a year just in maintenance between painting, landscaping, furnace issues, roof issues, things like that. uh because I often see people make this mistake and not take into consideration the actual maintenance costs here in Colorado for owning a home. Number nine, most people when they look at retiring here, you have certain things that you want in life today that didn't matter 20 years ago, right? You don't have kids in the house anymore that you need to transport all around. But when you're looking here, uh, you're going to see that a lot of the neighborhoods with potentially the views that you want aren't going to be nearly as accessible as you want them to be. So, it's going to be a real tradeoff that you're going to have to make. So, make sure you don't prioritize your views over your access to things like health care, dining, shopping, things like that, depending on where you are in your retirement and how willing you are to drive to get to things.
Budget Planning & Expenses
Location & Accessibility
[2:32] Number eight, one of the biggest questions I get from people retiring here, uh, when they haven't lived here before is, you know, how much are people actually going to visit me? Um, because it's a big concern. And like I said, maybe you have someone here already in your family. Uh, maybe your family visits here a lot and that's why you're thinking about moving here. Um, but moving here and having people visit is two different things. So, you want to make sure that you're close to the main throughways, the main arteries of the city, because if you're too far off the beaten path, I can tell you there will be people that come here to Colorado, let's say, to go skiing and will unfortunately pass you right up. So, don't underestimate where you're looking and the importance of how accessible it is for your friends and family to actually come visit you in retirement.
[3:19] Number seven, and this is a great one here, is no doubt that as we all age, you know, things like health care become way more important. What's amazing is that the whole Denver metro area has some of the best health care access you can have uh with some very specialized needs and services, some of the best neurological uh surgeons and programs in the entire country. Like we are set up here really really well for healthcare access. But again, depending on where you are, uh you want to make sure that it's something that you take into consideration. Being in the foothills, when looking on a map, things can look really, really close. Let's take Evergreen as a great example. A lot of people ask me about Evergreen, and it looks close on a map. Might even look close to I7, and then you realize you got to snake and weave your way 6 to 8 miles, and it's another 20 to 30 minutes just to get to your house, even though you can see the town from where you are.
[4:13] So, you really have to take that into consideration uh when moving here. And you know, that's this is exactly what we do when everybody's going through their discovery sessions on where they might want to live is mapping things out according to your priorities. Now, if you're someone who loves to do your research, what I'm going to say is that you should really download this free luxury retirement guide here. It's over a 100 pages of the information that you actually want to know. uh healthcare access, amenities, um crime and safety, you know, the things you really want to know. Totally free. So, just scan that QR code, download it, let me know if you got questions. Number six, we do have 300 days of sunshine here. It is beautiful in the winter. It is beautiful in the summer. We don't have humidity.
Climate & Weather Considerations
[4:58] It's 15% average humidity here for most of the summer. Uh so 90° isn't even that hot. And in the winter, 30° is sweater weather. Um, but you cannot overestimate what the seasonality shift here does. You know, if you're moving from Florida or Arizona, California, um, and you're looking here, we do have all four seasons, and often times they can happen in the same exact day. Uh, we get big snowstorms early in October and November, and we can get them late into March and April and even May. And if you go up to the mountains, I mean, we get snow from October until May pretty darn consistently. And even then, you know, you can see patches of snow in June and July. So, don't underestimate the weather and especially when it comes to looking at houses, take into consideration what direction your house is facing and where things like shade falls. Is facing north in your neighborhood a really, really bad idea because you're going to have snow mounds build up there depending on where you are. If you are looking in the foothills, if you're on the lowlands here, we don't have those sorts of issues. So, really important to kind of understand what the different seasons are going to do depending on where you live. And yeah, don't underestimate how harsh our weather can absolutely be.
[6:09] Number five, and this one might be the trickiest one because if you haven't lived somewhere, you really don't know what the lifestyle is like. You go look at homes, you really don't know what the neighbors are like. So, you have to do a whole lot of discovery to try to figure this out. You know, are you big pickle ball players, right? Is there a pickle ball court within the neighborhood? Does the HOA offer it? Have they outlawed it because it's just too darn noisy? Uh, and these are going to be the things that you really need to dig into. You're going to have to lean on friends, family. You're going to have to explore these neighborhoods. You're going to have to look at a lot of places and talk to as many people as you can. Go take a walk through the neighborhood. Stop the neighbors, you know, talk to them about what it's like living there. You're going to find out a lot of great information. And you can't rely on anybody else but yourself for that proper information. People like me can help, but we still don't know exactly what lifestyle you want. Do you want a neighborhood with lots of kids in it, or would you rather have a community where the average age is over 50 years old, right? So, really pay attention to this because this one is really, really tricky when you've never lived there before. And this kind of ties in to number four pretty well at least some advice that you can take and use that will save you months, years of regret, and that is it might be worthwhile to rent somewhere first and really get to understand the area. Stay there for 3, four, 5, 6 months. Get a long-term, you know, Airbnb sort of situation, a midterm rental that's maybe furnished and really put your feet on the ground and find out what the lifestyle is like, right? the hiking access. Uh take the drives back and forth, see what the community actually feels like. It's going to give you a ton of feedback that is invaluable that you cannot duplicate in any other way. So again, it might be really worthwhile to look at renting a place where you're thinking of living first if that's an option for you before taking the big plunge. Number three, when you're going to make the shift in moving in retirement, it's very possible that the house you've been in you've been in for 20 or so years. And maybe you're looking to just be in a much more beautiful location. Maybe you're looking to get a bigger house because you're anticipating more family and friends coming over to visit more often. Maybe you're looking to downsize because you want to get away from friends and family visiting. Uh, you know, that's totally up to you. But I often see people get caught up in where they want to be, which then forces them into a house that is way, way, way too big or way too small and they outlive their needs. So, piggybacking on the last one here, again, it might be worthwhile to try to find a place to rent. make sure that it fits your needs within the community that you're looking at. Because what you're going to find as you look at different neighborhoods is if you want to be in the foothills, it's going to be really hard to find a 2,000 ft house that faces Denver and the skyline because most of those houses are 1.5 million and above and they're all north of 4,000 ft. If you want to be south of the city in Castle Pines, again, you're going to have a hard time finding a smaller house. So, really think about that. Um, and if you want to move up to Summit County and you have a budget, you know, of a million dollars in mind and you want a 4,000T house, it is not going to happen. So, take this into consideration uh when planning your move and really what works right for you.
Lifestyle Fit Assessment
Renting Before Buying
Right-Sized Home Selection
[9:33] Number two, you know, the next 20 years of your life is going to look a little bit different than it is today, and access to things might become vitally more important. So don't put yourself in a position where you get trapped in a location that things become way too far and unreasonable for and then you have to try to make a shift. So just make sure you're looking at the access to things, health care, amenities, what the drive is like, right? Uh if you're looking in the foothills again, like is that drive just going to be too much as you get older and you don't want to drive on wet, snowy roads, right? Um, take all that stuff into mind. And again, if you like to do research, download this uh, luxury retirement guide. It's going to go over all this stuff with you. And you can, of course, schedule a one-on-one with me. Just give me a call, shoot me a text message here below. Be happy to go over your goals in your retirement years. And the number one biggest mistake I see retirees make when moving here to Colorado is basing their decision on where they vacationed.
[10:36] Uh lots of people have come here to Colorado and vacation to places like Vale or Aspen. Uh lots in Summit County, right? Breen Ridge, Keystone, things like that. Um but the reality of living in some of those places uh is often different than when you're on vacation. You know, I live down in Denver here and we go up to the mountains all the time. Every couple of weeks we're up there uh skiing, hiking, you know, you name it.
[11:02] But if I were to move up there, I wouldn't want to live on the slopes in Breen Ridge. I wouldn't want a ski in, ski out place. It would be obnoxious. Uh, but that's my personal preference. Some people, that's exactly what you want. But most of those homes are second homes. I would live 10 15 minutes out of town because I don't want to deal with a lot of that chaos. Uh, you know, Silverthorn is a great area north of all the chaos up there. get more room, get more spread out, live around a lot more of the locals instead of just being around tourists all the time. And then the same thing on the front range here.
[11:35] You know, maybe you've come here and vacationed and you've been in central Denver. Uh but that's very different living here versus um you know, just vacationing here. So again, going back to how to make this transition properly. If you can do a short to midterm rental, that would be my number one biggest suggestion for you to really figure out and to visit places in different seasons, different times of year, different times of day, uh to kind of see what it's like, you know, but after being here for 25 years now, um there's a lot of misconceptions about Denver and the surrounding areas, which is why I put together this video, which you really want to watch because it might save you a lot of heartache.
Testing Your Decision
Frequently Asked Questions
How much more expensive is Colorado than other states for retirees?
Colorado runs about 10-15% more expensive than most of the country, though some coastal markets are still pricier. Housing, groceries, utilities, and healthcare all run above the national average. I recommend retirees take their current monthly expenses and add 25% as a safety margin when budgeting for the move.
What is the best part of Denver for retirees who want healthcare access?
Neighborhoods along the I-25 corridor and near major hospital systems like Anschutz Medical Campus, Porter Adventist, and Swedish Medical Center offer the best healthcare proximity. South metro areas like Greenwood Village, Centennial, and parts of Castle Rock balance healthcare access with quieter retirement-friendly living.
Is Evergreen a good place to retire in Colorado?
Evergreen is beautiful but tricky for retirement. The mountain roads add 20-30 minutes to most trips, snow makes winter driving challenging, and access to specialized healthcare requires a real commute. It works for active retirees who love foothills living, but I'd encourage renting there first before committing.
How much should I budget for home maintenance in Colorado?
Plan on 1-2% of your home's value per year for maintenance. On a $1 million home, that's $10,000 to $20,000 annually for roof work, painting, landscaping, furnace service, and weather-related repairs. Colorado's sun, hail, and snow cycles wear homes down faster than milder climates.
Should I buy a ski-in ski-out home for retirement in Colorado?
For most retirees, no. Ski-in ski-out homes in Vail, Breckenridge, or Aspen are designed for second-home owners and vacationers. Year-round living means dealing with tourist crowds, limited services, and high costs. Living 10-15 minutes outside resort towns, like Silverthorne, usually offers a better full-time lifestyle.
What is the weather really like in Colorado year-round?
Colorado has 300 days of sunshine and very low humidity (around 15% in summer), but four real seasons. Expect snow from October through May, occasional storms into June at elevation, and dramatic temperature swings. Summer days can hit 90 but cool quickly at night. It's drier and sunnier than most retirees expect.
How long should I rent before buying a retirement home in Denver?
I recommend 3 to 6 months minimum. That window lets you experience at least two seasons, test the daily commute to healthcare and amenities, meet neighbors, and understand the lifestyle of specific neighborhoods. Furnished midterm rentals and long-term Airbnbs work well for this kind of trial period.
Thinking about buying or selling in Denver?
Call or text (303) 552-4804 for a no-pressure conversation about your situation.
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