Missouri is right in the middle of everything, even retirement rankings: Most lists have the state among neither the best nor the worst for retirees. Here are some facts to know about retiring in the Show Me State.
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- Getting Older
- Missouri's not quite caught up with the Sun Belt, but it has one city that made U.S. News & World Report's 2012 list of cities with the most people older than age 65: Independence, hometown of President Harry S. Truman, with 16.1 percent of its 116,830 people age 65 or older. The rest of the list was dominated by – surprise – Florida, with one each in Arizona, Hawaii, and Michigan. According to the Missouri Division of Budget and Planning, the elderly are likely to account for 21 percent of the state population by 2030.
- Retirement Crisis
- So many state employees are approaching retirement age, Missouri and several other states put policies in place to encourage them to keep working while collecting some benefits – just to keep the state government operating long enough for younger workers to take up the reins, according to BenefitsPro.
- Unpredictable Weather
- Still right in the middle of everything, Missouri is where cooler northern air meets warm, humid air coming up from the Gulf of Mexico for a wild weather ride. Thunderstorms and tornadoes are a fact of daily life across the state as things warm up for the spring and summer. Mental Floss notes the most destructive tornado in U.S. history touched down March 18, 1925, and wreaked deadly havoc across Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana, killing 695 people and injuring more than 2,000. Annapolis, Missouri, was 90 percent wiped out.
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- Buy the Farm? - For a select few who can swing the investment and put in the work, going back to the land is what they call "retirement." Although only 12 percent of new farmers are age 65 or older, according to a report from Harvest Public Media, 38 percent of established farms are run by farmers older than age 65. Retirement's seen less often these days as a time to wind down and more as a time to pursue a passion, according to the Harvest story that featured interviews with two farmers from the same family who retired from city jobs and started their own separate farms in Missouri.
- Earthquakes?
- People might think quakes are exclusively a West Coast thing, even if recent news of tremors across the Great Lakes shows they are not. In fact, the most severe quakes in North American history were from December 1811 to February 1812 along a fault running under New Madrid. The quake was so severe there were reports of the Mississippi River running backward and, modern experts say, had there been cities of the sort that are nearby now, the effects of the quake would have been devastating.
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