Best Places to Retire

Sperling's Best Places Review

Sperling's Best Places is a website (www.bestplaces.net) that lets you find your own best place by entering a city, town or zip code. It also lists this 20 of the Most Popular Places. This includes cities ranging from Portland Oregon and Charlotte North Carolina, Minneapolis, Minnesota and Boulder Colorado.

Search for a city to live and retire

If you search Sperling's Best Places for a particular city such as Lincoln, Nebraska, you'll find a good deal of information including the city's population, how its population has changed, real estate for sale and information regarding local schools. You'll also find an overview of the city with its median home cost, home appreciation in the past year and its unemployment rate.

What happens if you search on a larger city such as San Diego? In this case, you'll get a long list of how it ranks for many different attributes such as how it ranks in America's healthiest cities, best green cities, best airports to make a connection and the best block party places. For example, you can read that San Diego is ranked second for the drought-riskiest cities, number three for the most competitive public colleges and number 12 for America's healthiest cities. Plus, you will be able to see the same overview as is available for Lincoln, NE.

When you click on Most Popular Places

If you click on one of the site's Best Places - for example, Austin, Texas, you receive about the same information as if you had searched on San Diego. That is, it shows how the city ranks for a number of different characteristics such as high gas prices, most irritation prone cities and cities on the edge of greatness-where it is ranked #5. Additionally, you will find information on Austin Moving Companies, Homes for Sale, Texas Insurance and Best Places to Retire. However, be prepared that these are generally sponsored links and will take you to a listing of paid ads.

Sperling's Best Places also has a list of states. If you click on one of these, such as Oregon, you can see information similar to what you find when you search on a specific city-that is, an overview of the state, information on its median home cost, how much it spends on its public schools and its unemployment rate.

Features

The website also includes a section called More Sperling's Features. This consists of articles on specific topics such as Cities on the Edge of Greatness, Where to Live to Avoid a Natural Disaster and The Best Cities to Relocate in America. These articles have been aggregated from other sources. For example the article on avoiding a natural disaster comes from the New York Times.

Across the top of the Best Places website is a series of clickable links that provide useful information that allows you to compare schools, cities, climates and so forth. You could also click on a link titled Compare Cost Of Living where you can input the name of the city where you're now living and the city that you want to compare it with, along with your annual income. The site will then display how your current city compares to the other city in terms of the cost of food, housing, utilities and so forth.

In summary - helpful but lacking

The site, Sperling's Best Places provides a great deal of helpful information. However it is lacking in the kind of details that could help you decide about relocating or retiring to a particular city. It is strong on facts but weak on "color"-that is, information about parks, golf courses, recreation and cultural facilities that would flesh out the facts and help you develop a real understanding of what life in a specific town or city might be like.

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