Rehoboth Beach, Delaware featured as one of the best places to retire by AARP – The Magazine (July 2006)

Two years before they planned to retire, Sonja and Hoyte Decker settled on the Delaware coast as their retirement destination. Living in Chevy Chase, Maryland, near where Hoyte worked for the U.S. Department of Transportation, the two had been spending weekends and vacations on the sandy beaches of the Maryland and Delaware shores for years. But they liked friendly little Rehoboth Beach best of all. Just three hours from friends and their daughter in Washington, D.C., it was also reasonably close to Hoyte’s two children from a previous marriage.

But finding their retirement house was challenging: Rehoboth Beach itself is only about one square mile, with fewer than 1,500 full-time residents. Housing costs—as in many beach communities—were sky-high. “Houses were just too expensive, even in the late 1990s,” says Hoyte, 65, “or else they were just small cottages, or they weren’t winterized. We decided against buying an existing home. We had retired without a mortgage—that had always been our goal. And we wanted to keep it that way,” he says.

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