Best Places to Retire Lists: the Best and Worst

In the movie, Fargo, one of the villains hides out for weeks in a snowbound cabin on an isolated, wind-whipped North Dakota lake. Mainly because he is bored out of his skull, he murders his partner by stuffing him in a wood chipper. If you are driven homicidal by bitter cold and empty space, please ignore the 2013 Best Places to Retire lists from Forbes and Bankrate. Both extol North Dakota as a retiree paradise for reasons a wee bit murky.

If  low tax rates and plenty of hospital beds are enough to make this frigid state a top place to retire, what happens if you take a look at some of the other retirement “bests”? How do the lists stack up against reality? We decided to brave the stereotypical retiree images and dive in.

 

Let’s Take a Look at the Best Places Lists

 

The makers of best place to retire lists base their choices on an array of data, like median house prices and ratio of hospitals per state residents. Numbers, however, can’t depict the mundane reality of living anywhere.

Bankrate

Bankrate put beautiful, arts-loaded Oregon way down at the bottom of its list of “Worst Places to Retire,” primarily because Oregon is expensive. Yet Bankrate’s hot pick, North Dakota, is struggling to accommodate new oil boom workers flooding the state. This month, the Financial Times found North Dakota managers who were earning $100,000 per year living in cramped Airstream campers with no running water.

Some of Bankrate’s list was contradictory. Tennessee was number one, praised for having America’s most accessible medical care. Sadly, many Tennesseans will need an ER given the state’s violent crime rate. Bankrate claims to have pored through the FBI Uniform Crime Report when making the list. But it gave Louisiana, another state plagued with a high crime rate, a place on the list without explaining how much of that crime was violent or in which cities it occurred most often. Click here to see the Bankrate list.

Forbes

Forbes plopped North Dakota on its list on the basis that, if you have to work through your retirement, the state has America’s lowest unemployment rate in the country. Maybe you could be an entrepreneur who brings a fun restaurant or art gallery to amenity-hungry oil workers? Newcomers to the state yearn for music venues and movie theaters, and retaining retail workers there is so tough, some chains have flown in temps. Click here to see the Forbes list.

Kiplinger

New Orleans made Kiplinger’s “Best Cities for Retirees,” largely because Social Security and military retirement benefits are tax-free there. “Although warring gangs keep the murder rate high, burglaries and thefts track close to the national average,” Kiplinger offers in a rather jarring closing note. Seriously, does no one at these news agencies know how to map crime stats in different cities so a retiree can see which are besieged by gun-crazed gangs and which have litterbugs and beer-chugging teens filling the arrest records? Click here to see the Kiplinger list.

 

Bankers Life & Casualty

Bankers Life and Casualty Company’s Center for a Secure Retirement “Best Places for Seniors” ranks Minneapolis number one and makes a surprising choice for the list by ranking Newark NJ as number 10. Newark gets especially high marks for senior-friendly “social life” because Rutgers University offers arts and cultural entertainment and New York City is close at hand. This might prompt you to wonder how much the list makers know about how seniors meet new friends. Yes, the list also counts the number of houses of worship in each metro area, in case you like to meet people through your church affiliation – but if you make friends through volunteer work or art gallery crawls or Thai cooking lessons, New York’s proximity may be irrelevant, given you’d have to take the train to the subway to get there.” Click here to see the Bankers Life & Casualty list.

US News & World Report

US News & World Report soothes recession-rattled boomers with “Best Places to Retire for Less than $40,000 yearly.” The average monthly Social Security benefit in 2012 was $1,230. Married spouses each drawing that amount get less than $30,000 per year. “Add a modest nest egg of $250,000, and that could bring your retirement income to around $40,000 per year,” US News notes cheerily, oblivious to how statistically uncommon a $250,000 nest egg is for people in their 60s and early 70s today.

That said, the list includes some charming towns and details several sweet deals for retirees. For example, Columbia SC bus fares are less than $1 per ride and the University of South Carolina waives tuition for some residents age 60 and over. Click here to see the US New list.

Smart Money

Smart Money’s macro list of 100 “lesser known gems” includes at least two towns or cities in each of the 50 states with services and amenities that its editors see as especially suited to today’s retirees. Among them: in New York (‘one of the tax hell states,’ as a commenter points out) the list picks brutally cold but appealingly quirky Ithaca; in Florida, Cape Coral (unemployment 11.3%, in case you’re thinking of working); in Cali, San Luis Obispo (median home cost $498,300). Click here to see Smart Money’s list.