I hear a lot of talk about retirees leaving the US and heading off to live an expat lifestyle in order to make their social security and pension monies go further. Or to live in a beautiful, culture-filled place they've dreamed of...

I hear people talk of Costa Rica, Vietnam, France, Italy -- even Mexico, Panama and India...

I've been interested enough to read a few articles on this, but realistically I know Steve would never go for it, so I'm only educating myself for the fun of it.

Anyway, I just came across this fascinating chart, which I thought I'd share with you:

Titled Top Ten Countries to Grow Old In the list pulls from a larger list, that ranks 96 countries in term of how they treat their older population.

The bigger chart is called "Global Age Watch Index 2014" and it comes from HelpAge.org. You can see the larger chart here and you may be interested in what it reveals.

According to it, the two top countries for our aging populations are Norway and Sweden! I wasn't totally surprised, though I do think the chart fails to take into account that the cost of living in Scandinavia is quite high.

The saddest thing, in my opinion, was that someone looked at the chart, and got very interested in living in Norway. Primarily, I think, be cause the guaranteed monthly government pension for retirees is the equivalent of slightly over $1000 USD/month.

So this woman wonders, in her post, "wow ..be nice to retire here ...wonder what they have to offer a person on SSD and can i still get the govenment money i was blessed with."


Then she gets serious and closes with this:
"Do they have churches and believe in God? so many questions from someone in Ohio"

Sounds like she has no idea Norway is a Northern European country, that the dominant religion is Evangelical Lutheran, and that they even have a number of very beautiful churches there...

But just for the record, here's what Wikipedia says about religion in Norway.