Something many people (especially Americans) forget to consider when selecting a place to retire is the almost guaranteed need for lots and lots of high quality medical care wherever you end up. I suspect many people here on HN will retire with large enough retirement savings (and other assets) to settle down like kings in many places in the world. But the distribution of high quality care for ahem people of advancing ages, is very uneven and most of the places with better care have very high costs of living (e.g. Northern Europe) or very high costs of medical care (everywhere U.S.).

There's also a desire to try to make daily costs of living stretch more and many retired people will find themselves retiring to rural environments. However, those places may also be very far away from the kind of emergency medical care that's likely to be needed.

The intersection of decent cost of living, close to medical facilities, high quality medical establishment, and affordable medical care leaves not too many places in the world.

At the moment, my wife and I are considering retiring to South Korea (not Seoul) or Japan (not Tokyo) since those seem to be places with that rare intersection. I'm sure some places in Western Europe may also qualify.