Topping Our 2017 In Review: Different Takes on Best Places to Retire

January 3, 2018 — It is always a good exercise to review our most read articles of the year. It tells us what our Members are looking for, and it has the side benefit of alerting new readers to articles that struck home for others. So here goes:

Site recap
Thanks so much to our many members and visitors. We enjoy your feedback, and most of all the 1000s of incredible Comments we get to our articles each year. Your input is valued by us and your fellow members. In 2017 Topretirements.com had over 2 million site visitors and 5 million page views. It is gratifying to know that we are being useful in some fashion to people interested in retirement.

The Years’s most read articles
With one exception, all of the most popular Blog articles on 2017 had to do with some aspect of “best” retirement place. The holdout was the one on the failed congressional effort to replace Obamacare.
1. Affordable Places to Retire on the Coast – Part 2. This was an older article that we updated this year, and that propelled it to the #1 spot. It was read 25,000 times.

2. 2017 Best Places to Retire: Two Towns in the West Take Over . Our annual list of the 100 most popular places to retire, as expressed by readership at Topretirements, is always very…popular.

3. Tempted by The Villages-Here Are Some of the Best Retirement Alternatives. We updated this always well-read article late in the year. There are 2 parts in the series – Alternatives East and Alternatives West.

4. Proposed Obama Care Replacement Hammers Early Retirees. This article stands out because it is the sole article on this list that doesn’t have to do with some kind of “best place to retire”. Obviously health care is important to our Members. The article generated the most comments, from all sides of the issue, of any 2017 article.

5. The Carolinas Revisited: Part 2 of Flo’s South Carolina Explorations. We are very much indebted to Flo for contributing this interesting chronicle of her South Carolina retirement explorations.

6. 10 Great Retirement Towns Where You Don’t Need a Car. The popularity of this article helped reinforce our belief that many are looking for a place to retire where they might not only be able to keep the car in the garage, but perhaps even bike or walk instead of even owing one.

7. The 8 Most Interesting Places to Retire in the USA. Because this piece was only published in mid December, and therefor didn’t have much time to build big numbers, it could be the most popular article of the year.

8. Best Cities for Aging? Head for the Midwest Who doesn’t want to age well, or at least find out how? This article was based on the Milken Report on Successful Aging, which found that, based on a number of relevant factors, Iowa City, Iowa is the best city for aging in the country. Almost all of the other top 10 towns were in the midwest too.

9. Which Is Better for Retirement: Florida or Arizona. Of course the real answer is in the eye of the retiree, but at least with this article you can see the factors that might tilt it one way or the other for you. Certainly the dries vs. wets have their opinions on humidity.

10. What the Retirement Experts Should Have Told You About Retirement Planning. We had a lot of fun with this article, in which we interviewed a group of retirement experts about how their own personal retirement planning was going. Not all of them would give themselves an A.

Other top categories for 2017
Most popular Blog article for the year – but published in a previous year. 11 Affordable Places to Retire on the Waterfront. For some reasons this perennial article brings a lot of new visitors into Topretirements.com – and for that we are grateful. It was read 100,000 times last year.

Comments
If you have a favorite article you would like to mention, or a suggestion for a future one, please share your opinions in the Comments section below.

For further reading:
Most Popular Articles for 2016