If you are looking to move from a high cost-of-living location to a lower one, the best tool you can use during your search is one of the cost of living calculators on the Internet that compare one city to the next. The sites I reference for my clients access census and other "official" data to make their comparisons. The numbers are essential guidance because they determine how much a couple might be able to spend on a home and, more to the point, on the carrying costs, such as club dues, homeowner association fees and other living expenses, their budgets will have to accommodate. A mistake in the calculation can seriously impede a happy retirement.
It is fundamental, therefore, to know what you are looking at on the cost-comparison web sites. A look at two of the most popular demonstrates that the results for the same comparisons can yield significantly different results.
The price of steak in Asheville
The two sites are BestPlaces.net and BankRate.com. BankRate does a brilliant job of lining up a long list of comparisons in spending categories that get down to the most granular level; if you eat a lot of meat, for example, you will appreciate how much more or less a T-bone steak costs in the South than in the North. Comparisons of pharmaceutical costs are more relevant, especially as we age, and those are available as well for selected drugs. BestPlaces provides some of these comparisons, although not down to the level of a T-bone, but you have to jump from section to section of their web site to find the specific costs. But in one important area, BestPlaces is more functional and less prone to cause a misinterpretation of the results, and that is in the specific towns it provides for comparison, whereas BankRate uses "metro" areas that, in some cases, comprise towns with entirely different cost profiles, especially in terms of housing costs.
I found this out during test comparisons of Hartford, CT, with Asheville, NC. I chose Hartford because it is 10 miles from my Connecticut home and I probably know the city as well as any other. On BankRate.com, the Hartford "metro" area includes the towns of East Hartford and West Hartford, as well as the larger city. You really won't find two towns much more different than East and West Hartford, the former a blue collar burg of hard working folks, many of them attracted to the area by East Hartford’s Pratt & Whitney jet engine plant which has been central to the local economy for six decades. West Hartford is home to many more upscale homes and a few multi-million dollar mansions, and its town center is a hub for thriving retail and restaurant activity.
One metro area, two different cost profiles
Mindful that most moves from North to South will lower annual expenses, sometimes dramatically so, I was not surprised that BankRate.com yielded a 22% cost of living reduction comparing a move from the Hartford metro to Asheville, NC. And it made sense that when I checked the comparison of upscale West Hartford’s annual costs against Asheville, the drop was similar at 23%. What I was not prepared for was the much smaller reductions for East Hartford and the city of Hartford itself when compared with Asheville, 5% and 6% respectively. In short, a couple moving from Hartford to Asheville and using the BankRate number of 22% could be in for a shock when they find out that their real expenses don’t change that much. Of course, the Hartford metro area comprises many other towns, some of them with cost levels similar to West Hartford’s, but the upshot is that the BankRate number, though based on reliable data provided by ACCRA’s CostofLiving.org, is too broad in its geography. BestPlaces lists a couple dozen sources for the data it uses across its entire web site, but doesn’t indicate the specific source(s) for its cost-of-living data. (Note: The CostofLiving.org site charges a fee for cost of living comparisons.)
I checked a half dozen other cost comparison sites and found that they all produced fairly similar results for a Hartford to Asheville relocation. Some provide a long list of cities the way BestPlaces does. The U.S. Department of State web site helpfully lists more than a dozen sites with cost of living comparison calculators. You will find them here. Some of the sites include multiple cities to compare in each state, others just a few (e.g. just three, at some sites, for all of Connecticut). I suggest you take a few of them for a test drive to see which ones provide the best data for you. But for our money, BestPlaces.net still provides the most helpful comparisons.
