If you’ve reached the not so old age of 50 and you live in the U.S. you’ve probably already started receiving mailers (and maybe emails) from the AARP or American Association of Retired Persons. If you’re just 50 to 60 years old, it’s unlikely that you’ve actually retired but the AARP doesn’t care. It still wants you to fork down $10 and become a member.
Before you join, you might want to go to the Association’s website, www.aarp.com. It offers so much information that you might want to save our $10 and just visit it once in awhile.
The website’s home page has links to an array of information such as health, money, work and retirement, personal growth, politics and society, relationships, food, travel and more. If you click on the link Work and Retirement, you are taken to a page that has nine subcategories – job hunting, self-employment, working after retirement, etc. There is also a link titled Retirement Planning. This leads to a page where, if you scroll down far enough, you will find articles on “10 Best-Rated States for Retirement” and “10 Worst-Rated States for Retirement.” These listings come from the site, www.Money-rates.com.
Clicking on the “10 Best-Rated takes you to a page that describes the criteria used in picking these states which, according to Money-rates.com, are Arkansas, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Maryland, South Carolina, Alaska, Michigan and Nevada. The names of these states are not clickable, meaning that you can’t get any further information on them.
However, there is a list of related articles on the right side of the page that includes, among others, Best places to retire abroad, Best places to live the simple life, and Best places to live a healthy life.
If you are interested in retiring abroad and click on that link, you’re taken to a page with information on what AARP believes are the 10 best places to retire abroad. Some of the countries on this list are Belize (formerly known as British Honduras), France, Nicaragua, Mexico and Portugal.
Any list of the 10 best of anything basically comes down to subjective opinions. And the AARP list of the 10 best places to retire abroad would be no exception. Ditto the list of 10 Best-Rated States For Retirement. Several of the states – North Carolina, South Carolina and Arkansas – would be on just about everyone’s list of great states for retirement. However, other people might knock Michigan off the list and substitute Texas or scratch Alaska in favor of New Mexico or Arizona.
AARP.com Review – In summary – helpful but not all-inclusive
The AARP website offers a lot of good information that could be of help to retirees or near-retirees. However, it falls short of the mark in its selection of Best-Rated States and Best Places to Retire Abroad. Both of these lists are “overviews” and, as such, are short on details. For example, Michigan might be a Best-Rated state but where in Michigan would be a good place to retire – Detroit, East Lansing, or the Upper Peninsula? And one could certainly argue that Brazil might be just as good a place to retire as Nicaragua.
In short, these lists are good starting places but just that – places to start researching where you might want to retire.
Learn about cheap places to retire around the world with a low cost of living compared to the US:
https://www.bestplacesretire.com/retire-cheap.php