Hawaii 2nd-Worst State for Retirement
From Yahoo Finance, Jan 3, 2020 (excerpt)
…If you’re looking for the best place to retire in the U.S., bundle up.
Most of the top states for retirees aren’t known for warm winters, according to a ranking from Blacktower Financial Management, but perform well based on other key factors, such as crime, cost of living, and life expectancy, among others.
“You can spend a few more months in Florida or other southern states when it’s a little colder,” said Christopher Thornton, country manager at Blacktower in a recent conversation with Yahoo Finance.
“But for the rest of the year, when you’ve got to worry about your expenditure and your budgeting,” he said, “these [other] states are actually more cost-effective to live in.”
Calculating the best and worst states for retirement
Blacktower sourced data from government and nonprofit sites and calculated a cumulative score based on these factors:
Cost of living: The median cost of living in the United States is indexed at 98.5, derived from a national survey by the Missouri Economic Research and Information Center.
Crime: This number represents how many violent crimes were committed per 100,000 people in 2017. The crime rate in the U.S. was 394 crimes per 100,000 people.
Age: Age of population data was sourced from the Census. The average share of those 60 and older among the 50 states is 21.46%.
Property price: Average property prices were also sourced from Census data. The average among the 50 states is $263,544.
Life expectancy: The average life expectancy in the 50 states ranged from 74.5 to 81.5 years, based on data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, an independent health research center. …
No. 2: Hawaii
The second worst state for retirement is also the state with the highest life expectancy at 81.5 years. With a population of 1.2 million, 23% of Hawaii’s residents are 60 and above.
Still, the state has the highest average home price at $659,823 and the highest cost of living in the nation, almost doubling the U.S. average.
“I think we’d all love to live in Hawaii, wouldn’t we?” Thornton said. “But ultimately, it comes down to how far do those retirement dollars go. If you want to live in Hawaii, you have to pay a premium.”
read … Second Worst