Lincoln County fourth-most financially healthy county in New Mexico
Study looked at rates of unemployment and poverty, number of bankruptcies and debt as a percentage of income
- Los Alamos topped the list
A recent study by SmartAsset ranks Lincoln County as the fourth financially healthy county in New Mexico.
The New York financial technology company ranked counties based on debt as a percentage of income, bankruptcies, the poverty rate and the unemployment rate.
Los Alamos topped the list, but carried a high 1.19 percent figure for the "debt as percentage of income" category. Bankruptcies were low at 0.28 of one percent, poverty was 4 percent and unemployment was 3.80 percent.
Eddy County was second, followed by Lea County and then Lincoln, which posted a 1.14 percent figure for debt as percentage of income, a 0.76 of a percent for bankruptcies, 18.20 percent for poverty and 5.50 percent for unemployment,. In 2018, that figure dropped by a full percentage point.
There’s a lot more to financial health than how much income one earns in a given year. To find the most financially healthy places, SmartAsset took a holistic approach, considering debt as a percent of income, bankruptcies per 1,000 people, poverty rates and unemployment rates in its analysis. To calculate debt as a percent of income, the staff divided debt per capita by income per capita. To calculate bankruptcies per 1,000 people, they divided total bankruptcies by the population, and multiplied that number by 1,000.
To calculate the Financial Health Index, they weighted debt as a percent of income 25 percent, bankruptcies 40 percent, poverty rates 20 percent and unemployment rates 15 percent. They then ranked the counties on each of the categories and indexed each category, added the indices together and indexed that.
In the study, a financially healthy county means people there have low average debt as a percent of income, along with a low chance of being affected by personal bankruptcies, poverty or unemployment.
Rounding out the top 10 of the 33 counties in the state were Roosevelt, Chaves, Curry, Grant, Socorro and Otero.
Sources of information were the Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Census Bureau, 2016 Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates Program, Federal Reserve Bank of New York and U.S. Bankruptcy Courts.
Check out the full study and an interactive map at https://smartasset.com/retirement/financial-advisor#newmexico.