Thanks for reading! I wish I would blog more, too! I write so slowly that I have way more ideas than I have time to write. >Apart from your rent and private h

Thanks for reading! I wish I would blog more, too! I write so slowly that I have way more ideas than I have time to write. >Apart from your rent and private health insurance what else about the cost of living in Manhattan (apart from rent, food) pushed your expenses to 7K a month. I'm assuming you moved to a lower cost of area without modifying your lifestyle too much, so it's crazy that you'd get such a dramatic decrease in cost just by moving. Good question! One thing to keep in mind was that I don't have especially expensive tastes, but I also didn't adjust my lifestyle at all when I quit until I moved, so I could have lowered it from $6-7k if I put more effort in. One big expense in New York is just the cost of socializing. In other areas, I feel like people socialize more at each other's houses. In New York, because housing is so expensive, it's hard to have a group of friends over, so people tend to meet at restaurants, which are expensive. And nobody has a car, but everyone lives spread out, so you spend a lot on Uber. But if you're living in Manhattan, everyone around you is living this relatively high income / high spend lifestyle, so you don't really notice spending so much. And I'm not even talking like bottle service, five-star restaurant dining. Just like get brunch together, go do some activity that costs $30-50/person, have dinner, that could be like $100-200 in a single day. Part of what keeps my costs down in Western Mass is that a) costs are just way lower and b) people around me don't have such a high income so normal activities that people choose are relatively cheap.