Deciding Where to Move?
Imagine you are ready to find a home, so you search for which cities offers the highest wages. You see New York and become ecstatic, until you find out how high the cost of living is. You become stuck, unsure of how to proceed. Where should you move to achieve the highest standard of living?
While simple to ask, this question is incredibly difficult to answer. For one, there are thousands of different cities you can move to, and many factors that determine standard of living. Additionally, the wages that you can earn in your current career varies by city. To answer this question, we must first dive deeper into one of these factors: affordability. In order to sustainably live somewhere, you have to be able to afford it. Affordability depends on two variables: wages and cost of living. What is the relationship between these two variables?
Factors of Affordability
The supply and demand for goods and services determines the cost of living in an area. Urban areas are densely populated, meaning that the ratio of people to land is huge. This is because of the abundance of jobs and opportunities available in large cities. Therefore, there is a large demand but a limited supply for goods and services in these regions, causing prices to be high. This means that to live in these regions you have to earn higher wages.
Both cost of living and local wages determine affordability, but why is understanding this important? We can use these two factors to calculate affordability by dividing wages by cost of living. If this ratio is high, then you can afford to live in this region; otherwise, you cannot afford to live in this region. In order to calculate the affordability of over 350 different metropolitan areas by occupation, I created a program that you can use https://techeid.com/affordability-app/. What I discovered was that places with the highest wages were often not very affordable. In fact, for a restaurant cook, the most affordable place to live is Lewiston, Idaho.
The next time you are deciding where to move to, consider both wages and cost of living. Remember that the type of area you are moving to affects these two factors. In urban areas, these factors tend to be high, but in suburban areas they tend to be lower.
See my article on an affordable computer that can be provided to low-income families: https://techeid.com/an-affordable-computer-for-low-income-families/
