Looking for an accurate Cost of Living (COLA) calculator
Has anyone found a relatively accurate Cost of Living Calculator for comparing the cost of the city your are currently living in to another city? I've tried bestplaces.net, Nerd Wallet COLA calculator, and smartasset.com and all are giving me wildly different numbers.
Ideally the calculator would include taxes in its comparisons and include smaller metro areas in it's dataset. I'm open to exploring free and paid options.
In payment for all your great insights, I offer up one fun resource I've found while digging into this stuff, Harvard Growth Lab’s Urban Economy Navigator: Metroverse | Harvard Growth Lab
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I can't find the site right now, but I was looking into this a couple of weeks ago. I stumbled on one I liked because it projected salaries I could expect. Everywhere else is focused on cost, like "you need $X more to live in this city". The site I found indicated that the city was about 30% more expensive in costs, but salaries for equivalent work were only about 15% higher. That gave me a more realistic ability to calculate possible savings rates in the new city.
There is no one stop shop for any location calculators. Most don’t have small cities. Some don’t even have medium cities. They assume a ton of things like every result includes having a mortgage.
You have to piece and part everything together yourself.
Take a look at city-data dot com. They have data on population, demographics, income, housing prices and property values, poverty, industries and occupations, climate, crime, other things. They show a cost of living index for each city, for example:
- Boston, MA 133.7
- Charlotte, NC 93.5
They do have both big and small cities. I don’t see tax data other than median real estate taxes paid.
I haven't looked at too many of the tools you mentioned, but at first glance
Cost of Living
seems to be pretty good. It was mentioned in by Kristy Shen in the book Parent Like A Millionaire.