Product Description

The bestselling guide to the best places to retire in the United States.

Completely revised and updated, Retirement Places Rated is an indispensable reference for the estimated 40 million Americans who will be 65 or older by 2010. Dividing the United States into 18 regions and 200 cities, towns, and   counties, retirement quality-of-life expert David Savageau draws a detailed statistical portrait of each locale, ranking each for cost of living, climate, crime, services, employment opportunities, and leisure and recreational amenities. A rundown of the top 30 overall retirement places along with assessment tools, easy-to-read graphs and charts, interpretive commentaries by the author, and extensive appendices help retirees evaluate their relocation choices and make the right move.

For the seventh edition, new features include:

• 22 new places
• A new chapter on housing, with   data on shelter choices (homes, condos, apartments, and mobile homes), plus home prices and property taxes
• An expanded   ambience chapter, and   new data on age, education, politics, and diversity
• An expanded services chapter, with new data on air travel, physician specialties, and hospital services
• Easy-to-use relocation resources, including Web sites, addresses, books, and other information
• David Savageau Washington DC has traveled throughout the country since 1982, visiting locations that attract older adults. He wrote the "Quality of Life" column for Expansion Management magazine, and has been a featured speaker at the U.S. Department of State’s quarterly seminars on retirement.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #168901 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 302 pages

Review
". . . you’ll find a number of books that rate and rank places as regions or communities. However, for [retirement], the most complete is from the famous wanderer, David Savageau.--Richard Bolles and John Nelson, What Color is Your Parachute? For Retirement (2007)

"When I came across Savageau’s book, I was awed by the extraordinary amount of research that went into its creation. As a reporter who has spent his life gathering information, I could appreciate the effort involved." --Stan Hinden, How to Retire Happy (2006)

" . . . the lowdown on terrific, affordable places to spend your retirement."--Jordan Goodman, Everyone’s Money Book on Retirement Planning (2002)

"The great resource not only explains the most important retirement location considerations, but it rates big and small towns on key components. Savageau’s new book is the best in its field."--Robert J. Bruss, Tribune Media Services, August 1999

From the Back Cover
The best source for selecting an ideal location for your retirement or second home

Profiles of 200 retirement areas in more than 40 states

In this completely revised and updated edition, the top retirement areas are ranked and rated by seven essential criteria to help you make the right choices for your lifestyle:

• The best places to enjoy the performing arts and the outdoors

• The most reasonably priced places to live, including information on owning, renting, and retirement communities

• The most stable and comfortable climates

• The safest and most crime-free areas

• The best in health care, shopping, continuing education, and other services

• The best opportunities for employment

Only in Retirement Places Rated:

• A personalized quiz to help you determine the factors that are most important to you

• Additional resources you can contact to make the most informed choices, from newspapers to tax commissions

About the Author
David Savageau is the author of the best-selling Places Rated Almanac. Since 1982, he has traveled throughout the country visiting locations that attract older adults. He lives in Washington, D.C., and is a featured speaker at the U.S. Department of State's quarterly seminars on retirement.

Customer Reviews

Quantitive ratings provide good information
The beauty of the book is that Savageau's rankings are both (a) quantative, reducing the chance for the author's personal preferences to affect the ratings, and (b) pretty well explained: you know how he came up with the ratings. It's unlikely that your own list does not include several in Savageau's group. Since he explains the basis for each location's standing in each category (there are seven), the reader can make his/her own judgements if a particular factor is of less interest to that reader than it is to the author. In fact, a sort of interest quiz in the first chapter helps the reader understand which factors are more important to him/her. This armed, the reader could use the approach to his/her own list of places.

Other books of this genre tend to lean heavily on opinion and seem to get a lot of input from the chamber of commerce. That's not a problem here.

Retirement Places Rated Provides Reference
While I have some reservations about the relative "weights" provided to some of the information groups, this is a good reference with which to compare information among cities and regions. Contrasting the climate or economic strengths of different locations is relatively easy using this book.

Each section of this reference guide has a scoring system which eventually corresponds to a scale of 100. In this way, the author attempts to compare and contrast disparate issues, such as cost of living, services and crime. But while the detail is "good", the accumulation of scores to arrive at a final ranking of all locations lacks some merit. High cost of living cities still have very high overall ranks because of arbitrary "high" scores for subjective items such as ambience. Also crime rates tend to be of limited value because some locations under report actual crime statistics.

Overall, I would recommend this guide as a starting point for those considering relocation when retiring. While it may not answer all questions, which the author admits, it does give the reader a place to start when compiling their own list for what they are looking for in a retirement setting.

One of the best comparision books
This book is very good if you are looking to retire or locate somewhere else, plus it gives you a lot of good information on your locate area and state. Very well written, however I think in some cases the tax information is incorrect. In Maryland the piggy back tax is not calculated and this makes the state income taxes look lower. Weather information, crime, health and cost of living were very interesting, and comparing areas of states or state to state was easy.