Don't Believe the Fear Mongers: California Is a Fairly Safe State

Ebola will claim us all. Prison realignment will send waves of criminals into the streets. California will fall into the sea!

It's all possible. But none of that has happened yet.

It turns out California is a relatively safe place to live. So says personal finance site WalletHub, which just published its list of the 2016's Safest States in America.

The site analyzed states according to 25 metrics, including number of assaults per capita, the unemployment rate and estimated losses from climate disasters.

Rising crime in places such as?Los Angeles and San Francisco apparently couldn't hold the state's safety status back.

We were ranked 19th for safety nationwide. That's in the top half, and then some.

The Golden State ranked low (40th), however, in workplace safety, WalletHub found. So watch your back. And we ranked pretty low (35th) for financial safety (unemployment, credit scores, poverty). So watch your wallet.

Strangely, we ranked fifth in terms of the highest percentage of people in a state with rainy-day funds, the site said.

And ? hold on to your hats ? we were No. 1 in the U-S-of-A for lowest estimated property losses from climate disasters. Really.

The safest state in America, according to this analysis, is Sen. Bernie Sanders' own Vermont. Seeing the fervor displayed by some of his followers, we wouldn't be surprised to see some of them move there.

Meanwhile, El?Ni?o didn't wipe us off the map. And the Big One has yet to arrive. So, yeah, it has been pretty smooth sailing around here.

Just remember to lock your doors.

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