Bankrate.com has conducted a study of 172 major metropolitan areas to find the best and worst in which to retire. The Phoenix/Mesa area places first, while the New York City area ranks last.
The
survey rates the cities according to their cost of living, crime rate (violent and property crimes), walkability, healthcare quality, state and local tax burden, personal well-being for seniors and weather (temperature and precipitation).
As for Phoenix/Mesa it has an average cost of living, a low crime rate, good well-being, below average walkability, low taxes, average healthcare and great weather.
When it comes to the New York City area, it has a very high cost of living, low crime, below average well-being, great walkability, very high taxes, below average healthcare and below average weather.
In other retirement news, you can thank your elected officials at the state and local level for making a mess of the public pension system, says Steve Malanga, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
"Around the country, state and local officials have increasingly discovered over the years that they can exploit the complex and sometimes ill-defined accounting of government pension systems, as well as loopholes in their own laws governing those pensions,"
he writes in the Washington Examiner.
"Over time, elected officials came to promise workers politically popular new benefits without setting aside the money to pay for them, declared 'holidays' from contributions into pension systems and changed their own accounting systems midstream to make the systems seem better funded—all just ways of passing obligations on to future taxpayers."
The ugly results have now become apparent.
"Our elected representatives played a deceptive game of chicken with pension funds. And now the chickens have come home to roost," Malanga says. America's states and municipalities face a $1.5 trillion pension shortfall, and possibly $4 trillion if the funds' investment returns don't match expectations, he explains.
© 2025 Newsmax Finance. All rights reserved.