Yesterday, Lifehacker linked to a very cool calculator at CNN Money. This calculator takes your salary and location and tells you what your comparable salary would be in another part of the country. As someone living in the DC area (note – to find DC, select Virginia as the state), I was very interested to see what my comparable salary would be in other cities that I have lived in. DC is so expensive that it’s hard to comprehend the numbers. My salary sure sounds great to my friends still living in the St. Louis area – but now I know that in comparable terms, they’re making as much or more than I am, mostly thanks to the high cost of housing here.
I had a good time inputting numbers and figuring out a reasonable salary in the various locations. Honolulu? Way more expensive. Anchorage? Less expensive (only because of housing – transportation, healthcare, groceries, everything else is more expensive). Manhattan? Laughably more expensive. Housing is 85% more than it is in DC.
So then I compared Anchorage to Manhattan. Housing is 200% more in Manhattan than it is in Anchorage. I wonder how those calculations are made. Are we talking the comparison between average homes? An average home in Anchorage might be a one family home with a backyard, where an average home in Manhattan might be a two bedroom apartment? I don’t know. If it’s a square foot comparison, I would expect the difference to be even higher.
It’s a fun little calculator to play with, and if you’re looking at a move across the country, it will give you an idea of a comparable salary, so you have a general idea of what to look for. As someone living in a more expensive area, it made me want to save a higher percentage of my salary, because hey, look at what that savings could get me in a less expensive area!
Megan is a 40-something government employee in the Washington, DC area. She got interested in Personal Finance when she got out of college and realized that her paycheck wasn’t going to go as far as she had hoped. Since starting this blog, she has managed to buy a house and make a solid start on her retirement goals, and hopes to help others do the same. Here is her story:
In 2007, I was a gainfully employed 20-something with no debt but not a lot of knowledge about personal finance. It was a co-worker’s comment about Roth IRAs that sent me to the internet, searching for information. It was then that I realized that I really didn’t know a whole lot about personal finance and that my current financial situation was due a lot to inherent frugal tendencies, generous family members, a fear of debt, and good luck. While that was working for me, clearly I needed a better plan.
While I had no debt, I was also pretty much living paycheck to paycheck and not worrying about going over budget (I say this as if I had a real budget) because I had an emergency fund set aside to cover any overages.
Except that’s not what an emergency fund is for.
So I did a lot of research, read a lot of blogs, and decided that I needed a plan. I needed to budget. I needed to know what I was spending my money on. I needed to prepare for the future.
I decided to create a blog not only to make myself accountable to others but also to share the knowledge that I gained along the way. I’ve learned so much from my fellow bloggers, and I hope that my readers can find something useful in what I have to share as well.
I used on of those when I was finishing undergrad to compare the cities I was interested in with average salaries for the jobs I was looking at. It really helped to clarify things.