Wyoming Cabin Life

The Wyoming retirement plan has evolved over the last 6 months. Originally, we were going to sell our house in Oregon, use the money from the sale to move to Wyoming, find jobs and buy some property with a house on it or build a home on it. The goal was always to have a job, but as time went on we really started to enjoy being retired. We know we are relatively young to be retired, but not having to deal with the stress of full time employment has been a blessing. Our mental and physical health has improved and its been nice to spend time with each other. The epiphany of wanting to stay retired (for now) changed our housing goal. It took some time to adjust our goals. The big house on property was a good goal and we had been focused on this goal for months, so giving it up has been difficult. We started to compromise on our wants as time went by. Maybe we don’t need property. Maybe we build a big new house on a lot. Maybe we buy a big house that needs some remodeling. None of these m...

One of the great things about Wyoming is it’s desire to keep government regulation under control. One of the challenges of home buying in Wyoming is the lack of government regulation. It’s a double edged sword. Wyoming is a “buyer beware” state. Sellers aren’t required to fill out a disclosure form listing the deficiencies of their property. This is great for the seller, but not so much for the buyer. When we asked the realtor for the disclosure on the first house we wanted to put an offer on she replied, “Oh, we don’t do those here. In fact we discourage sellers from filling them out because they really don’t know how to.” What!? It was a bit of a shock because we had just sold our home in Oregon and the disclosure was part of listing the house. We decided to use common sense and paid for a home inspection, including a radon test. What a blessing the home inspection was! We learned a lot of new information during the home inspection like: Outside city limits permits are not requ...

It all started with the crazy idea that we would take a two week road trip checking out different states to retire to. We drove through Oregon, California, Nevada, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho. Prior to our trip we researched housing, job availability, taxes, and outdoor activities like hiking, fishing, motorcycle riding, and water sports. By the time we were ready to leave we already were leaning towards Idaho or Wyoming. The taxes, or the lack of certain taxes, was a big plus for Wyoming! We had a great time on our trip and fell in love with Wyoming. It’s stunning beauty, nice people, low taxes, low crime rates, and housing costs all fit the bill for our retirement needs. We were ready to move! Jim fully retired that November and I was getting ready to leave employment by February. We had a plan! Needless to say, the plan did not go as smoothly as hoped. The job Jim had applied for had an extremely long hiring process which made it difficult to plan an exit date. So we fini...