The Best Place for you to Retire is…

For many, the prospect of retirement seems impossibly far away, something to be worried about at a later time. But for millions of Americans each year, retirement is today’s concern, not tomorrow’s – and determining where to spend one’s Golden Years is a real and pressing issue.

But just what makes the perfect retirement destination? Low crime? Affordable homes? Access to healthcare? Proximity to arts and culture? What about a community’s size, and/or its share of residents that are also retirees? When it comes to retirement, there are no wrong answers, because everyone has different priorities.

Which is why, in conjunction with Reuters, we created the tool below to help create a custom list of retirement destinations based on what matters to you.

Where do you want to be when you retire? Use the first dropdown menu to search the entire nation or a selected number of states. Do you like big cities or small towns? The second dropdown menu can be used to limit the search based on city size. What is your housing budget? Use the home values dropdown to select a range of home values to only see places where the cost of homes[1] meets your budget.

The last five dropdown menus weight the importance of different characteristics that could contribute to a decision to move when retiring[2]:

• Weather: measured as the average number of pleasant days per year[3];
• Access to healthcare: the number of hospitals and pharmacies per capita[4]
• Proximity to entertainment options: measuring the number of cinemas, civic community centers, higher education buildings, historical monuments, libraries, museums, park/recreation areas, and performing arts buildings[5]
• The percentage of residents over 65 years old.[6]
• Low Crime: The crime rate for aggravated assault, burglary, homicide, larceny, and five other crimes (using Relocation Essentials data).

[1] Median list price or median sale price was used for places where the median home value (Zillow Home Value Index) was not available. Data is from September 2014.

[2] Where data was missing for one or more metrics, the median score from 0 to 10 was used in lieu of actual data so that the area would not be penalized for missing data in the construction of the overall score.

[3] Source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Global Surface Summary of Day.

[4] Source: Navteq. Hospitals were weighted ten times as heavily as pharmacies given that pharmacies are ten times as prevalent in the U.S.

[5] Source: Navteq.

[6] Source: U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey (ACS).