Doctor Shortages And Bad Air Quality, New Mapping Resources To Help With Your Next Move

If you’re new to my blog you might not know I’ve done tons of mapping posts over the years that detail various aspects of personal finance from a geographic perspective.  Many or most of these posts can be hugely valuable if you’re considering moving to a new area for geoarbitrage reasons or any other reason.  I compiled these posts on a special page on my blog called Geoarbitrage Tools And Resources which has a special link at the top. 

Admittedly I’ve been lazy about keeping up with these and updating it, and I know some of the mapping resources I link to are dead or inactive.  I hope to rectify that soon. 

All that said I haven’t posted any new resources for a while, and today I want to do just that.

New Mapping Resources!

One of the most important aspects of personal finance is healthcare.  In America it’s expensive, screwed up, it’s tied to your job for the most part, and it’s one of the biggest fears of those who hope to retire early.  And it’s an industry in turmoil from many aspects. 

One of the numerous crises in healthcare is the shortage of primary care clinicians in many parts of America.  In February CNN did a piece on this with a nifty mapping tool to show the problem from a geographic perspective.  The point of this post is not to go into the details or reasons for the shortage of primary care doctors, but to show the map.

The map is interactive on the CNN page and if you hover your mouse over any purple dot it will show details about the doctor shortage in that area.  In a nutshell, the darker the purple and the bigger the circle the worse the problem is.  And HPSA stands for “Health Professional Shortage Area”  which CNN sloppily does not explain.  You can read more about that methodology here. 

To get the full scope of the problem I highly recommend reading the article in full.  The takeaway for us FIRE folks who might want to use geoarbitrage as a strategy to get to financial independence is that you probably wouldn’t wouldn’t want to move to an area that faces a dire shortage of primary care doctors.  The map in the CNN article can help you suss that out.

Air Quality

The second mapping resource I found is also related to health.  IQAir is a great site that has air quality reports for the entire world in a nice interactive mapping interface.

The site gathers data on PM2.5 (which is particulate matter with a diameter of 2.5 micrometers or less) from 7,812 cities spanning 134 countries, regions, and territories.  Here’s a screen shot of the map zoomed over the Washington D.C. region with a specific site highlighted.

Regular readers might recall I did a dedicated air quality post last summer when most of the East Cost of America was suffering from horrendous air quality from the Canadian Wildfires.  That post has numerous cool interactive maps that show air quality as well, and this one can be added to your toolbox. 

As with access to doctors, I think air quality would rank quite high on my list of considerations when choosing an area to move to.  Thankfully we have great tools to help.

Geoarbitrage

So there you have it financial warriors, two new mapping resources to help you if you’re considering a move in the near future.  If you are looking to geoarbitrage your way to financial independence and relocate, I think we could all agree that access to doctors and air quality matter.

I do lots of posts like this that show various aspects of money and finance from a location perspective.  So you’re considering Geoarbitrage in the United States be sure to check out my Geoarbitrage Resources Page which has tons of great tools to help you find your perfect location.

I hope you find these resources handy and I will continue to expose valuable tools that can help when deciding on a geoarbitrage strategy