AFFORDABILITY CALCULATOR
Where can I afford
to retire?
Most affordability tools assume you are buying with 20 percent down, which is wrong for almost everyone who moves in retirement carrying proceeds from a house they already own. Enter the cash you can put down, your monthly budget, and whether you plan to buy or rent, and see which cities actually fit.
Free. Nothing to sign up for, nothing stored.
HOW IT WORKS
Three inputs. One honest number.
Every city on RetireMeHere carries a typical home value, a local property tax rate, a homeowners insurance estimate, and a walkability score. The calculator rebuilds the monthly cost of each one around your equity rather than a generic down payment.
Your cash sets the loan
Your cash comes off the typical home value. What is left is the loan, amortised over 30 years at the current Freddie Mac rate. Bring enough and the loan reaches zero.
Your budget filters
Everything that costs the same wherever you live, and everything that does not, is added back: taxes, insurance, Medicare, utilities, food, getting around. Cities above your number drop out.
Scores do the ranking
Survivors are ordered by their combined score across nine of the ten dimensions that shape retirement life, not by price. Budget sits out, because affordability has already had its say as the filter. Cheapest is not the same as best.
WHAT THE NUMBER MEANS
A couple, both 65 or over, moving in 2026
One figure per city, built the same way every time, defensible to a reader with a calculator. A single retiree runs roughly $200 a month lower on healthcare and about $100 lower on food, while housing does not change, so read every figure here as a little high if you are moving alone.
Included in the monthly figure
- Principal and interest on the loan your equity leaves behind
- Property tax at the local rate
- Homeowners insurance at the local estimate
- Medicare Part B and Part D for two
- Medigap Plan G, priced by state
- Out-of-pocket dental, vision, and copays
- Utilities, adjusted for heat and winter
- Food at the USDA Moderate plan
- Transportation, scaled to how walkable the city is
- Dining out, hobbies, and everyday discretionary
Deliberately left out
- State income tax, which the tax dimension already scores separately
- Federal income tax
- Long-term care insurance
- HOA fees, which run $200 to $600 a month in master-planned communities
- Major travel and large one-off purchases
- Savings and gifts
WHY EQUITY CHANGES EVERYTHING
The mortgage is the whole argument
A cash-or-mortgage switch answers two readers correctly and everyone else wrong.
Principal and interest is the largest line in a retirement budget and the one that varies most from city to city. Everything else, Medicare and groceries and utilities, moves within a few hundred dollars nationally. Housing moves by thousands. So the answer to where can I afford to retire depends almost entirely on how much of the house you are paying for with a loan.
A binary toggle gets the two ends right: the reader with no equity, and the reader writing a cheque for the whole thing. It gets the large middle wrong, and the large middle is most people who relocate in retirement. Entering an actual figure lets both ends fall out as the endpoints they are.
Property tax and insurance stay in full at every equity level. They attach to the house, not to the loan. Dropping them alongside the mortgage is the obvious mistake here, and in high-tax and high-insurance markets it understates an outright buyer by several hundred dollars a month.
Cost filters. It never ranks. Take the mortgage out of an expensive resort town and what is left is groceries, which would rank it ahead of a genuinely inexpensive city. That output is arithmetically correct and useless as an answer. So affordability decides which cities appear, and the nine dimensions that are not about money decide the order.
THE CALCULATOR
What can you afford?
Move the sliders. Results update as you go.
Cash you can put toward the purchase price: what you would clear selling your current home, plus any savings you would add to it. At zero this shows the cost with nothing down.
Everything you expect to spend in a month, housing included. Before income tax, which this figure leaves out.
Your cash goes toward the purchase price and shrinks the loan.
Your matches
Typical home values are Zillow ZHVI, snapshot June 30, 2026. Mortgage payments use the Freddie Mac PMMS 30-year fixed rate of 6.52 percent, week of June 11, 2026. Medicare figures are the CMS 2026 announcement. Property tax rates, insurance estimates, and dimension scores come from RetireMeHere city data, version July 27, 2026. Full method: BUDGET-METHODOLOGY.md, sections 3 to 6 and 14.
WHAT THIS DOES NOT MODEL
Three things worth knowing before you trust it
Renting is an approximation, not a rent survey.
The renting option uses the standard mortgaged figure, on the reasoning that a landlord's payment plus taxes plus insurance plus a margin is roughly what passes through to rent. That reasoning holds. What does not survive is the equity adjustment: your rent does not fall because you sold a house. So the renting option ignores your equity on purpose, and a proper rent view needs its own data and is not this one.
Single retirees. Every figure assumes two people. Healthcare and food scale per person, housing does not, so a single reader is overestimated by roughly $300 a month.
HOA fees. Not included anywhere, and the omission grows as your equity does. Once the mortgage is small, an unmodelled $400 a month in an active-adult community is a large share of a smaller total. Naples, Scottsdale, and similar markets are where this bites hardest.
FAQ
Common questions
Money is one dimension. There are ten.
Affordability narrows the field. The quiz weighs healthcare, climate, taxes, walkability, safety, and the rest against what you actually care about.
Take the quiz →Thinking about taxes too? Filter states by the taxes that matter to you in retirement.