Key Points
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The Motley Fool recently surveyed 2,000 people on what they look for in places to retire.
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The Motley Fool then applied this data to calculate a retirement score for all U.S. counties that met certain criteria.
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This article will focus on the best places for both quality of life and cost of living.
It’s never easy finding a good place to retire, typically because too often retirees are left to choose between price and lifestyle. The tension makes sense, of course, because if a place offers a high quality of life, many retirees will want to live there, leading to increased demand and therefore higher housing and living costs.
While nothing is perfect, retirees can research to find a good balance between affordability and quality of life. The Motley Fool recently conducted research on the top counties to live in and compiled the findings into a report titled The Motley Fool’s Best Places to Retire Index. Here are some counties where retirees are getting the best mix of affordability and lifestyle.
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Not where you might expect
The expectation is that areas with a high quality of life will be pricey, such as many areas in the Northeast. This also includes many areas of California with great weather. Florida can be a mixed bag, although several counties in Florida made it into The Motley Fool’s top-50 places to retire. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean they ranked the highest for cost of living or cost of housing.
To create its report, The Motley Fool surveyed 2,000 retired Americans to first understand what matters most to them in retirement. Based on these results, The Motley Fool applied a weighting to secondary data from eight public and institutional datasets to calculate a final retirement score for every U.S. county. The weightings are as follows:
- Quality of Life: 31%
- Healthcare access and quality: 15%
- Housing affordability: 13%
- Crime and safety: 12%
- Weather and climate: 12%
- State and local taxes: 11%
- Non-housing affordability: 6%
Readers can look at the index to find the top places based on all of these weightings, but in order to focus on the best mix of affordability and lifestyle, I focused more on quality of life (QOL), cost of housing (COH), and cost of living (COL), and picked counties with good scores in all three, generally speaking. Here’s what I found. Scores are out of 100 in each category, and I selected counties with scores of at least 50 in each of the three categories.
Cuyahoga County, Ohio
QOL: 53
COH: 61
COL: 79
Ramsey County, Minnesota
QOL: 67
COH: 51
COL: 79
Milwaukee County, Wisconsin
QOL: 54
COH: 55
COL: 87
Cook County, Illinois
QOL: 56
COH: 52
COL: 74
Somerset County, Maine
QOL: 56
COH: 52
COL: 74
Only Cuyahoga County, Ohio actually scored in the top five of The Motley Fool’s best places to retire, and some of the counties above were much further down the list. For instance, Somerset County, Maine, is ranked number 31. While it had solid scores in QOL, COH, and COL, it had lower scores for healthcare and taxes.
The top-three best places to retire are all in Florida, in the counties of Broward, St. John’s, and Gadsden. Broward and St. John’s have QOL scores of 70 or above, but both have COH scores below 50. Meanwhile, Gadsden has a QOL score of 41 but high COH and COL scores.
There will always be trade-offs
Retirees should enter this process understanding that there are likely to be pros and cons to wherever they choose to live. A high quality of life is likely to come with high costs, while more affordable housing and living costs may come with a lower quality of life. The key is to figure out what you most want in retirement, what you have to spend, and what makes the most sense.
For instance, if you want to travel more, it may make sense to retire somewhere with lower housing costs and a more affordable cost of living. Focus less on what your peers are doing and what specifically makes sense for you.
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