When thinking about retirement, most individuals picture excitement, relief, and freedom, and relaxation might cross your mind, too! While retirement is certainly a milestone to look forward to for some individuals, there are a few important things to plan before settling down the next stage in life. One of the most important is where you should retire! After all, location is key.
While most people have their own preferences on where they would like to spend the rest of their lives, there are plenty of people who look for warm weather and other attractive lifestyle options in the area. One of the first places that comes to mind is the Sunshine State, Florida.
When you think of somewhere that can attract some great lifestyle features, you don’t have to look much further than Florida. Florida has developed somewhat of a reputation for its retired community, and there are plenty of people who know someone who moved to Florida for the retirement transition.
At LendEDU, we evaluate all sorts of new data sets in order to provide useful information for various groups of people. In doing this, we hope to shed some insight on the world as well as provide an interesting reference for others.
As mentioned earlier, we wanted to look at Florida, so we came up with several metrics and considerations that would be taken into account by a soon-to-be retiree. We analyzed every town and city by zip code in the state of Florida with these metrics in mind. While this list isn’t exhaustive, we believe that these metrics help define towns in terms of hospitality, cost of living, and entertainment value. Towns and cities were ranked based on the following six criteria:
- Sales Tax Rate
- Home Sale Price
- Property Tax Rate
- Healthcare Locations
- Entertainment Options
- Percent of the Population Between the Ages of 65-84
Top 250 Places to Retire in Florida
Methodology
This report evaluated cities and towns in the state of Florida; each city and town was defined by its geographical location which was denoted by zip code. All data for this study was pulled from Onboard Informatics.
There were six metrics used to determine the retirement score for each town and city. The metrics included sales tax rate, home sale price, property tax, healthcare locations, entertainment options, and percent of the population ages 65 and up.
Each metric score was assigned a maximum weighted score and evaluated on an individual basis against its respective field with a percent rank. Each individual percent rank was multiplied by its respective weight to produce final metric scores. Metric scores were then summed together for each respective town or city, producing a final score. These final scores determined the overall ranking presented in this study.
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