(Pictured: Salt Lake City, Utah is number 1 in a study of which U.S. cities are the best places to retire.)

By Maggie Davis

Where they live can drastically impact what life is like for retirees.

The newest DepositAccounts study, released in January, looked at lifestyle, cost of living, medical quality and cost, and assisted-care quality and availability to determine the best places to retire. Across the 50 largest U.S. cities and metropolitan areas, Salt Lake City, Utah ranks as the best. On the other end of the scale, Seattle is the 22nd-worst, and Riverside, Calif., ranks last.

Salt Lake City is on top because ithas the lowest rate of preventable hospital stays (1,591 per 100,000 Medicare enrollees) and the highest percentage of older adults who volunteer (44 percent), plus a high percentage of physically active people . It also rates high in lifestyle (behind only Minneapolis, Minn. and Denver, Colo.).

Milwaukee, Wis. and Pittsburgh, Pa. rank second and third overall respectively, thanks to high marks for high percentages of physically activity, low median monthly housing costs ($996 in Pittsburgh), and low average healthcare costs for Medicare users.

California dominates the bottom of the list, with five of the 10 worst places to retire, mainly due to high costs of living. Besides Riverside at the very bottom, the low-ranking metros include San Jose, San Francisco, San Diego, and Los Angeles.

For the study, researchers with DepositAccounts, a Lending Tree-affiliated online source of banking and other financial analysis, grouped data into four categories with various metrics:

• Lifestyle (access to healthy food, arts, cultural and recreational venues, and amount of older adults involved physical activity and volunteerism).
• Cost of living (median monthly housing costs, regional prices for consumer items and services).
• Healthcare quality and cost (ratesof preventable hospital stays per 100,000 Medicare enrollees, if such stays might have been prevented by receiving outpatient treatment instead, and costs per Medicare beneficiary).
• Assisted-care availability and quality (jncluding number of home health service providers, continuing-care retirement communities, assisted-living facilities, and nursing-home beds per 100,000 residents, average quality of patient care star rating for home health agencies

While Seattle fared poorly overall, all wasn’t bad: It has the third-lowest rate of preventable hospital stays, at 1,850 per 100,000 Medicare enrollees.

Good care is crucial, noted Matt Schulz, LendingTree’s chief credit analyst and author of “Ask Questions, Save Money, Make More: How to Take Control of Your Financial Life.”

“If you don’t have your health, everything gets exponentially more challenging, no matter how old you are,” Schulz said. “The more you’re able to preserve your health and steer clear of the need for hospital stays, the better. And that’s not just about your physical health. It’s about your finances, too. There’s little that’s more expensive than bad health.”

The study was limited to the 50 largest 50 metro areas. Sources of information for the total analysis include the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Census Bureau, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, and individual county health rankings around the country.

The full report is available at depositaccounts.com.

Source: LendingTree, an online loan marketplace and financial researcher.