What would be the most significant characteristic of retirement planning?
If the answer given is “finances”, it is probably the right
answer. The next question to put forth is what is the best place is to retire
in? Being strategic about location can make a big impact on the quality of
life, and perhaps help the savings go just a bit further.
To help break it down, data from personal finance platform,
WalletHub, is visualized, which illustrates and ranks the best U.S. states for
retirement as of 2023.
Data and Methodology
WalletHub ranked each U.S. state using 47 metrics across
three dimensions.
Affordability (7 metrics worth 40 points)
Quality of Life (22 metrics worth 30 points)
Health Care (18 metrics worth 30 points)
Here are some examples of what each dimension measures:
Affordability: Cost of living and taxation
Quality of Life: Quality of elder-abuse protections and
crime rates
Health Care: Number of health professionals per capita and life expectancy
The final scores (visualized as the bars in the Infographic)
denote each state’s weighted average across all metrics.
This methodology reveals that Virginia is currently the best
state for retirement. Although the Southeastern state does not excel in any one
dimension, it scores consistently well across all three thus, creates a very stable
retirement profile.
This gives it a slight advantage over second place in the
list, Florida, as it excels in quality of life and affordability, but lags
further behind in terms of health care. State placed on the third rank, Colorado,
is a mirror of Florida, offering excellent health care but a lower quality of
life in comparison.
How to Interpret These Results
It is vital to remember that this ranking is purely based on
data and the methodology discussed above and may not be personalized to an
individual’s preferences.
For instance, if one believes that health services are the
most important during retirement, they might rank Minnesota (#1 in terms of
health care) much higher than eighth place.
It is significant to notice the fact that prioritizing one
dimension will often come at a trade-off in others. Looking at Minnesota once
more, we can see that this is also one of America’s most expensive states and
the cost of living here is very high.
