2018’s Best & Worst Cities for Keeping Your New Year’s Resolutions
By: Richie Bernardo
It’s easy to make New Year’s resolutions. The hard part is keeping them. But before you blame yourself entirely for your previous lack of success, consider this: Your location may be setting you up for failure.
If you live in a neighborhood with no sidewalks or fitness centers nearby, for example, you may not feel as encouraged to exercise. The same goes if most of your restaurant options are limited to fast food: You may be less likely to eat healthy on days you dine out. These might sound like excuses to the boldest resolvers, but they genuinely can impede a person’s progress at self-improvement, especially if motivation is low to begin with.
Estimates of the resolution failure rate vary from 42 percent to 92 percent. Regardless of the actual figure, a high number of people will fail at some point in the process and break the usual resolutions, such as “lose weight,” “save more” and “stress less.”
To determine where Americans are most likely to stick to their goals for 2018, WalletHub considered some of the most popular (and most commonly broken) resolutions to rank more than 180 U.S. cities based on their conduciveness to self-improvement. In each city, we looked at a total of 52 key metrics, ranging from gyms per capita to income growth to employment outlook. Read on for our findings, expert advice and a full description of our methodology.