WalletHub is back with another study, and buried in the data from its list of “Best & Worst Cities for Keeping Your New Year’s Resolution” is the finding that only 27.6 percent of Tampa’s residents are obese.
When it comes to keeping resolutions, Tampa is No. 27 out of 182 U.S. cities (St. Petersburg was No. 56). The study compared the cities across five types of resolutions: health, financial, school & work, bad-habits and relationships.
Within those dimensions were 56 metrics like the share of adults not exercising, share of delinquent debtors, high school dropout rate, binge & heavy drinking and more. The finding that 27.6 percent of Tampa’s residents are obese comes from the share of obese adults metric. The only other Florida city that fared better in the resolutions study was Orlando (No. 10); the lowest-ranked Sunshine State city was Hialeah (No. 167).
When asked for tips regarding improving financial habits for the new year, Dr. Chung-Yiu Peter Chiu was pretty practical.
“Spend cash, and credit only when absolutely necessary. This way you always have a good intuitive sense of how much you have spent, and how much you have left,” Chiu, Associate Professor of Psychology and Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of Cincincatti, said.
“Credit transactions dissociate us from the important feedback that cash transactions can give us. Giving over four $20 bills after dinner have a different feel than signing it away on the credit slip.”
See the heat map below or just dig deeper into the full study via wallethub.com.
This article appears in Dec 13-20, 2018.