First, it must be said that the reasons surrounding the notion of a good retirement can be numerous and varied since we are dealing with an event on an individual level, i. e. with subjectivity. So what matters most when deciding where to live when you retire is ultimately up to you. Location, cost of living, Housing, availability of health care, weather, local lifestyle, etc. all these factors are important, right? Or perhaps you think that a balanced combination of all these factors would be ideal.

But for practical and comparative purposes, it is convenient to define certain criteria and parameters that will allow us to visualize the problems of retiring in certain states considering the year 2022. So what we present in this article is a list of places that, given certain parameters, you would do well to avoid when retiring. But obviously, unless you have very strong personal reasons to go there, after all, your retirement plan needs to go beyond the cost of living, tax burdens, and quality of health care, although these are important considerations.

So it is important that you make a list of what is most important to you. Living closer to family, a mild climate, and feeling safe in your environment are all possible factors in deciding where to retire.

Personal finance website WalletHub compared the 50 states across three key criteria: affordability, quality of life, and health care. These criteria were evaluated using 47 relevant metrics, like the adjusted cost of living, tax-friendliness and cost of in-home services for affordability; risk of social isolation, elderly-friendly labor market, and access to public transportation for quality of life; and family medicine physicians/dentists/nurses per capita, quality of public hospitals and life expectancy for health care.

This is the list of the worst states to retire, according to WalletHub:

Ranking: 41

Total score: 46.03

Affordability:7

Quality of life: 47

Health care: 46

Ranking: 42

Total score: 45.63

Affordability: 17

Quality of life: 43

Health care: 45

Ranking: 43

Total score: 44.43

Affordability: 16

Quality of life: 48

Health care: 43

Ranking: 44

Total score: 44.35

Affordability: 40

Quality of life: 39

Health care: 19

Ranking: 45

Total score: 44.27

Affordability: 47

Quality of life: 23

Health care: 21

Ranking: 46

Total score: 43.97

Affordability: 21

Quality of life: 44

Health care: 44

Ranking: 47

Total score: 42.49

Affordability: 26

Quality of life: 42

Health care: 47

Ranking: 48

Total score: 42.47

Affordability: 50

Quality of life:12

Health care: 7

Ranking: 49

Total score: 41.17

Affordability: 12

Quality of life: 50

Health care: 49

Ranking: 50

Total score: 40.27

Affordability: 49

Quality of life: 34

Health care: 28

Source: WalletHub)

Note: With the exception of “Total Score,” all of the columns in the table above depict the relative rank of that state, where a rank of 1 represents the best conditions for that metric category.

By way of context, it is worth mentioning that, in general, retirement conditions are getting worse in the US, with fewer and fewer people being able to adequately prepare for this time in their lives. Over the last few decades, the overall picture is a picture of increasingly inadequate retirement savings for successive generations of Americans. Also, large disparities in income, race, ethnicity, education, and marital status.

A recent survey by economist Monique Morrissey from Economic Policy Institute found the following situation: