Every “best places to retire” list ranks somewhere for an average retiree who does not exist. Your version of the question has your grandchildren in it, your cardiologist, your tolerance for August, and your actual tax situation — and the honest comparison is genuinely hard to build, because some of what you care about you want more of and some you want less of.
That is the problem this workbook solves. Eight of its ten criteria run the ordinary way: a closer hospital is better, more family nearby is better, a kinder climate is better, so you rate them 1 to 5 yourself. Two of them run the other way — a lower cost of living and a lighter tax bill are what you want — and if you type a 1-to-5 rating for those the way you typed one for climate, you are quietly inventing an exchange rate between dollars and a five-point scale. People invent it badly, and almost always in favor of the place they already wanted.
So the workbook refuses to let you guess. You fill in what a year in each place would actually cost, and it converts that into a rating for you.
What a year there actually costs
House prices are the worst possible way to compare retirement destinations, because the house is the one cost you pay once. What decides whether the money lasts is the annual number, and the Cost of Living tab builds it a line at a time: property tax at that state’s own effective rate, homeowners insurance, HOA fees, utilities, everyday spending, Medicare premiums and out-of-pocket medical, the state taxes you would owe, the round trips back to see everybody, and the one-time cost of selling, moving and buying spread across your planning horizon.
The result is one comparable annual figure per location — and it is routinely thousands of dollars away from where people guess, usually because insurance, HOA fees or the flights home never make it onto the mental tally.
All 50 states and DC, already researched
Pick a state from the dropdown and the lookups happen for you — with one deliberate exception, below. The built-in State Tax Reference covers every US jurisdiction: whether there is an income tax and at what top rate, whether the state taxes Social Security benefits, whether it taxes pension and 401(k) or IRA withdrawals, the effective property tax rate on owner-occupied homes, combined state and local sales tax, estate and inheritance tax, and a cost-of-living index. Every column is sourced and dated on the tab and in a printable reference guide.
The exception is worth knowing about. For the twenty-odd states with a graduated income tax the workbook will not guess your effective rate — that depends on your brackets, deductions and exemptions, and inventing a number would be making something up and presenting it as arithmetic. It hands you the top rate, tells you where to get the real one, and declines to score that candidate until you supply it. An unscored candidate is a nuisance; a silently wrong one costs you the decision.
It is worth knowing what that table shows, because the headline everyone repeats — “no income tax” — is one of the least predictive facts about a retirement destination. Several no-income-tax states carry among the heaviest property or sales taxes in the country, and the three only mean something once they are added together.
The scorecard, and the price of fit
On the Decision Scorecard you set a weight for each criterion — how much it matters to your household, not in general — and rate each location on the eight judgment criteria. The top two rows fill themselves in from the money: your cheapest candidate scores a 5, your priciest a 1, and the rest land on the real size of the gap.
Results & Ranking then gives you the order, the margin, and the sentence that usually settles it: what choosing your best-scoring place over your cheapest one costs, per year and across your whole horizon. That converts a vague unease into a number you can actually decide about — and very often the answer is obvious once you can see it.
One column should always be staying exactly where you are, scored as ruthlessly as the others. It is the only candidate whose costs, doctors and friendships you already know for certain, it is the only one that pays no moving cost, and it wins these comparisons more often than people expect.
Try the method first, free
If you’d like to feel how the scoring works before buying, the free Where-to-Retire Web Scorer weighs two locations across the six core criteria right in your browser — no signup, nothing saved. It computes the cost and tax ratings from dollars you enter, exactly as the workbook does, and comes with a pre-filled starter scorecard you can download and keep.
What it can’t do is the part you’re paying for: with only two candidates the cost rows can only ever come out as 5 and 1, you have to work out each location’s annual cost yourself, and there’s no state tax table doing the lookups.
Works where you already work
Use the .xlsx in Microsoft Excel or LibreOffice Calc, or open the included one-click link and choose Make a copy for a ready-made native Google Sheets version in your own Drive — no importing, nothing to rebuild. It arrives pre-loaded with four illustrative candidates so you can watch every formula work before you overwrite them with your own.
A decision aid — not advice
This is a decision-making and planning template, not tax, financial, legal, medical or real-estate advice, and not a substitute for a tax preparer, a financial planner or a state’s own revenue department. The State Tax Reference is compiled from published sources named and dated in the file; state tax law changes every year, and its property tax figure is a statewide average that an individual county can sit well above or below — so verify anything that would change your decision before you act on it. The four example candidates and all their numbers are fictional.
A weighted score is a tool for thinking, not a verdict you have to obey. If the number picks a place and your gut objects, that gap is information: go back and find the criterion you were too embarrassed to weight highly. The decision, and the responsibility for it, stay with you.
