These 10 States Are Worst for a Financially Comfortable Retirement

How much are you planning to spend once you retire?

Depending on where you end up once you leave the office behind, you could actually be letting yourself in for considerably more expense than you bargained for. Different states have different rules on everything from taxing Social Security (or not) to taxing personal property (or not), and that’s in addition to sales taxes, the local cost of living, how much you might pay for housing and the soaring cost of health care.

Whether you’ve got a lot or only a little put by for retirement, you might want to have a closer look at how expensive it can be to live in the state in which you plan to retire—and you might even want to change those plans, depending on what you learn.

But of course, there are plenty of other reasons to choose, or abandon, a given state for retirement: family proximity, outdoor or cultural activities, the weather, the crime rate, or the quality (and cost) of health care, particularly if you’re living with a particular health condition that requires regular monitoring.

24/7 Wall St. has done some investigating into what it costs to retire in every state. To do so, it reviewed annual expenses at the state level from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ 2017 Consumer Expenditure Survey. It also checked on data from the Economic Policy Institute’s Family Budget Calculator for a couple 65 or older with no dependents—that tells how much the income a family needs for a “modest yet adequate standard of living at the metropolitan level.”

Then it reviewed the differences in budgetary needs between Americans overall and the 65-and-older crowd, using the Consumer Expenditure Survey. From all those inputs, it calculated the average annual retirement costs by state.

Check out the slides above showing the 10 states that would put the most strain on your wallet during retirement.

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