Once again Goochland County has been named as being among the nation’s richest places to live.

Folks moving into the county in 2008 made more money than those leaving, according to a recent magazine article.

This latest notice comes as a result of a May 14 Forbes Magazine article which ranks the nation’s counties by the average per capita income of people moving in.

Taken from 2008 IRS data, Goochland ranks seventh in the nation in this measure of earnings of new arrivals.

Average per capita income of the 1,445 new arrivals in 2008 was $64,630, according to Forbes. Those leaving (1,028) averaged $53,264 per capita.

Of the new arrivals, 530 came from Henrico County.

Goochland seems to pop up in these listing stories of wealthy counties every few months.In March, Forbes listed Goochland as the sixteenth richest county in the nation, with a median household income of $88,552.

Just over year ago, Goochland was named number one in the nation in average adjusted gross income, at $137,045, based on 2007 tax returns in a study by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

But that has changed. Checking the 2008 rankings at the clearinghouse’s website, one finds that Goochland has fallen to number eight in the income rankings.

Last year the average adjusted gross income in the county was lower by more than $28,000 at 108,973 a decline of 21 percent.

But terms used in these statistics-based stories are important.

An average income is derived by adding up the amounts reported on all tax returns and dividing by the number of returns. So a few extremely high earners can skew results toward the high side.

In a community of 100 people for instance, five individuals with adjusted gross incomes of $3 million each, combined with 95 others earning $30,000 each, would produce a whopping $178,500 average return.

Median income, on the other hand, means that half of the incomes are higher than the median and the other half are lower.

“You never know if they are talking about median or average income,” noted Board of Supervisors Chairman William Quarles, District 2, who said that there are still pockets of poverty in the county.