12 Unpopular Alabama Towns Where Retirees Truly Thrive

Every best-places-to-retire list ranks sunshine. None of them subtract the insurance bill. Alabama does something almost no state does. The year you turn sixty-five, it stops charging you the state portion of the property tax on the house you live in — no income test, no means test, written in one sentence on the Department of Revenue's own website. It does not tax your Social Security. It does not tax your pension. Then the homeowner's insurance bill arrives, somewhere between three and five thousand dollars a year, because this is Dixie Alley — one of the five worst states in America for tornadoes, seventy-one confirmed in a single year. The tax you stopped paying and the insurance you started paying are roughly the same size. So the real question is not whether Alabama is cheap. It is whether what you save at the courthouse survives what you pay the insurer — and the answer is different in every town. This video answers it twelve times, with the numbers on screen and the source under them. A town sitting on a slab of marble that holds up the United States Supreme Court. A town founded by Napoleon's exiled generals, handed ninety-two thousand acres on the condition that they grow olives. A town that once made more than half the socks in America. A town that raised both Harper Lee and Truman Capote on the same street. And, at number one, a town of thirty-three thousand people with two full hospitals and the cheapest housing on this list. One of these towns has the best story in the video and finishes last, because the rent takes sixty-nine cents of every Social Security dollar. It is ranked where the arithmetic put it. TOWNS COVERED Enterprise · Scottsboro · Fort Payne · Dothan · Alexander City · Troy · Andalusia · Sylacauga · Jasper · Demopolis · Monroeville · Gadsden CHAPTERS 00:00 The arithmetic every retirement list skips 01:30 #12 Enterprise — the best story, the worst numbers 03:12 #11 Scottsboro 04:40 #10 Fort Payne 06:16 #9 Dothan 07:42 #8 Alexander City 09:01 #7 Troy 11:01 #6 Andalusia 12:29 #5 Sylacauga 14:04 #4 Jasper 15:35 #3 Demopolis 17:18 #2 Monroeville 18:55 #1 Gadsden 21:30 What Alabama gives back, and what it takes 💬 Which Alabama town would you have put on this list — and what did I get wrong about yours? I read them.