Are Social Security checks your sole source of retirement income?

Retirement often comes with a slower pace of life. No more playing office politics, stressing over work deadlines, or struggling to make ends meet in a city with a punitive cost of living and a soul-crushing commute. The end of your career also brings new questions about how and where to spend your golden years when you won’t be tied to a specific location.

Should you settle in the mountains or by the beach? Do you prefer cross-country skiing or golf? Perhaps most importantly, where do your family, friends, and healthcare providers live? The answers to these where-to-retire questions are deeply personal.

To help you find some objective answers, financial experts analyzed a bevy of statistics on public health, the cost of living, and other metrics.

The average Social Security check is $1,632.04 per month. That’s not enough to live comfortably in most states in America, but Social Security was never supposed to be a retiree’s only source of income. Yet, many seniors live on just Social Security checks — a monthly payment that can’t cover their living expenses in some states.

We identified 10 US states that you can scratch off the list if Social Security checks are your only source of income. Here are the places where Social Security alone won’t pay the bills, listed from best to worst.