Moving from New York to Kentucky gave me an affordable life I love — and retiring at 55 is now on the table

Nick Lyktey went to Kentucky to fulfill a one-year working requirement, and stayed years later.

Courtesy of Nick Lyktey New Yorker Nick Lyktey moved to Kentucky for work, thinking he'd only be there for one year.

He ended up falling in love with Fort Wright, Kentucky, a suburb five miles outside Cincinnati.

He says the state's relative affordability has helped him build a better financial future for his family.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Nick Lyktey, 34, a New Yorker who grew up in Wantagh, on Long Island, but moved to Fort Wright, Kentucky, five miles outside Cincinnati.

He now works as the chief of lab operations at Gravity Diagnostics and has lived in Kentucky for seven years.

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I had a very set trajectory ever since the eighth grade; I knew what I wanted to do with my life.

Every move I made was based on working for the FBI .

I went to Penn State specifically because they have a really elite forensic science program where they have buildings on campus dedicated for crime scene analysis.

Even going to graduate school at Indiana University, that eliminated needing a larger amount of job experience required to get into the FBI .

After graduate school, I talked to a contact at the FBI and they said, "With your master's, you just need one year of work experience before you can be accepted into the special agent program." I'd always envisioned myself living on the East Coast .

I liked growing up on Long Island.

I didn't necessarily think I'd return to Long Island , but I wanted to be on the coast, and I think my familiarity with the East Coast would allow me to pick that over the West Coast.