Wednesday, May 2, 2012

The Cheapest Places to Retire in the U.S. for 2012

One of my closest friend's recently introduced me to a new book he discovered - the name speaks for itself, 'The Cheapest Places to Retire in the U.S. 2012 Edition'. The cool thing about this book is that a great deal of research went into it. So, it's not just another one of those subjective lists someone has put together to promote their particular community instead it's a fact based directory.

The author is Thomas Corley who is a Certified Public Accountant and a Certified Financial Planner.He runs a company called the Rich Habits Institute which is dedicated to helping people and organizations achieve financial freedom. He's accumulated literally thousands of hours of research into the many different locations around the United States that he found to be the cheapest places to live and retire. It's no lie to Tom has "crunched" a lot of numbers to come up with this list. In fact, he and his team have analyzed over 3,000 cities, towns and communities across the U.S. to come up with his Top 100 list. He looked at ten key relevant factors and then applied a proprietary scoring formula to each factor to determine which communities ranked highest as the best of the cheapest places to retire in the U.S.  The following factors were identified and used to create the directory:

Ten Key Retirement Factors -


  1. Lowest Housing Costs
  2. Lowest Property Tax 
  3. Lowest Sales Tax 
  4. Best Climate 
  5. Lowest Crime Rate 
  6. Lowest Income Tax 
  7. Closest to Major or Regional Metropolitan Areas 
  8. Closest to Hospitals 
  9. Closest to Airports 
  10. Closest to Beaches or Coastlines


If you look around on the Internet you'll see a lot of lists that claim to give you the top 10 or 100 but what sets this directory apart is the hard analytical data and the volume of work done to come up with an objective measure of 'cheap living'. Not only that but this list of the 100 cheapest places to retire is substantially different from the others based on the criteria that was used.

Now I keep referring to this as a list or directory but make no mistake it's not just a one page list of the top 100. Tom has gone a lot further to provide a full page of detailed analysis for each and every place on the list. You can get the highlights from his snap-shot 'The Good and The Bad' bullet points and you can dive in with detailed stats on the key retirement factors as well as a good narrative.

By now I hope you agree this sounds like a great resource to help you uncover a good place to retire on a limited budget.  But just to be sure we've worked with Tom to come up with a free 'Sneak Preview' of his book. This will give you a good idea of the content of the big book - how it is laid out and how valuable it could be to you if you are looking for that perfect spot to retire on a limited budget. To get the Free Mini-Book - just fill in the form below and we will send it directory to your e-mail box.

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