<div class="block">It&#39;s never too early to start thinking about your dream location for your retirement years. Beverly Harzog, consumer finance analyst at U.S. News &amp; World Report, joined &#39;Stretching Your Dollar&#39; to talk about her company&#39;s annual &#39;best places to retire&#39; list, which is based on a number of factors, including affordability, retiree tax rates and desirability among others.</div>

Stretching Your Dollar

Stretching Your Dollar: Best Places to Retire

Where to retire. It is an important decision that many Americans make every year or at least really dream about every year. Us News and World Report publishes its list of best places to retire. And joining me now to discuss the list is Beverly Haro of us News and World Report. Beverly Welcome. Thank you for having me. What factors should people did you consider actually when making the list every year? About the best places, you know, every year at us news, when we prepare our best places to retire, we do a survey of people who are at retirement age or near retirement age and we ask them what is the most important thing to you in a retirement spot? And we take these responses and then we assign weights to six different indexes, affordability, happiness, healthcare, quality, retiree taxes, desirability and job market. And this year, the most common answer in terms of where, what matters the most to them was affordability, which isn't surprising given, you know, housing prices and you know, the high cost of mortgages and high interest rates right now. So I know you have basically a template that you use every year anything different? Uh this year that went into the rankings. Yes, every year we take a look at our methodology and we want to be sure that we give consumers the very best information possible and we also want to address their current concerns. So this year, we added price parity to the affordability index. Now, previously, the affordability index housing prices, but with the addition of the price parity data point, we're taking a look at the cost of living in general in an area. So this gives, you know, retirees a good idea of not just how much the house is gonna cost or how much to rent an apartment, but also how much is it gonna cost to live in that area? So let's take a look at the list for this year at Pennsylvania taking all of the top five spots, believe it or not. For the first time ever. Uh Florida saw a drop in this year's top 10 placements. Uh Beverly, what's going on in Pennsylvania? That is uh having five towns there, five cities, the top places to retire. Yeah, Pennsylvania did very well this year, they also did pretty well. Last year. Last year, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania was number two on our list. And this year it shot up to number one. And one of the reasons is because the healthcare quality is so high, you know, uh in that area, you have access to world class health facilities. So that really brought them up, you know, in the list and some of the other, uh, Pennsylvania towns and cities also have some of the same, similar qualities, you know, uh, pretty, uh, friendly to retiree tax and high happiness level. Many of these communities have just a really nice, uh, cultural diversity and community feel about them and I think people are very attracted to that. Good. So I think people historically have thought about Florida when it comes to retirement, what's going on there that does not have Florida in any of the top spots this year, you know, Florida is still a great place to retire. You got beautiful beaches, you know, and lots to do. But what are the reasons Florida slipped back a little bit this year is because it's less affordable than some of these Pennsylvania cities, you know, just in compare compared to them. Uh also you don't have quite the level of health care facilities. And since we also added a fe a risk index to measure inclement weather, you know, Florida fell back a little bit because of that, you know, the response has showed us that people were very concerned about extreme weather events. So that made Florida fall back a little bit with the exception of Daytona Beach, which came in at number eight. Interesting. Anything else that surprised you about the list this year? You know, initially when I saw that New York City came in at number six, I was quite surprised, especially since this year, the overall theme seemed to be affordability. So when I looked at the numbers though, I could see clearly why it scored so well. You know, it's number one in healthcare quality, which of course is very important to retirees. They want to be sure they have access to world class facilities. So that propelled them up to number six. But New York City also has a high score in happiness. And in the job market, many were I either want to keep working or they want to start a second career. So it, you know, if you can afford New York City and not everyone can. But if you do have the financial resources, there is always something to do in New York City and it could be an exciting spot to retire in. Uh That is very true. Uh Beverly Broadcasting down here from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. I am Beverly Harz. Thank you as always.