Since you shouldn’t choose a place to live using outdated information, our analysis of retirement-places lists excludes any created before 2008. That left five leading raters: U.S. News, Money, Smart Money, TopRetirements.com, and RetirementLiving.com; together, they name 454 places.
The key thing to remember: The rankings vary widely in the scope of the places they consider and the statistical rigor they bring to their ranking. Some of the rankers, such as TopRetirements.com and RetirementLiving.com, consider a wide variety of reasonable criteria to get at a more rounded picture of “livability.” Others focus on one or two key factors to produce a very narrow sense of what makes a place “best.” U.S. News, for instance, lists best-retirement places ranging from ones that lean Republican (hello, Cincinnati) to ones filled with parks (Albuquerque).
Perhaps the best way to use the “best retirement places” rankings is to start with a narrowly focused list (such as cities dotted with golf courses or ones with affordable homes) and find a handful of potential winning destinations. Then, use other lists and Web sites to see how these places stack up on broader criteria, such as livability or recession resistance.
Here’s how these “best places to retire” raters rate on MoneyWatch.com’s scale of one to five stars. (Another site, FindUtopia.com, doesn’t compile rankings but has a wealth of useful information about choosing a place to retire.)
