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I've been looking at a move from a very low COL area to a very high one, recently, and this is spot on. But there's one huge caveat: you have to be willing to s
by dionidium 10y ago
I've been looking at a move from a very low COL area to a very high one, recently, and this is spot on. But there's one huge caveat: you have to be willing to sacrifice on housing.
Housing will swallow everything in any real apples-to-apples comparison. But if you can accept that you'll be living in a much worse apartment, then the COL differences aren't as extreme as they're generally stated to be.
- ghaff 10y agoThat's one of the reasons that COL factors, by themselves, don't mean an awful lot. If I were to move into a city it's clearly not even meaningful to talk about the price of the equivalent property to my exurban house on a fair bit of land. The relevant comparison is to what I would/could realistically and at least somewhat contentedly live in. As I said elsewhere you need to make that after-tax housing cost comparison. Aside from a few other potential factors like private schools, most of the other purely cost deltas are going to be relatively modest.
- dionidium 10y ago>If I were to move into a city it's clearly not even meaningful to talk about the price of the equivalent property to my exurban house on a fair bit of land. To be fair, it's a lot worse than that. I live in a nice, spacious, modern loft in the middle of an urban area. We're not talking about a big, suburban house. Just a nice apartment. I'm looking at apartments in the high-COL city that resemble my current apartment's entryway in size and in conditions I wouldn't even consider here.