Finding a job with a decent salary is a goal for many people, but maybe even more important is finding a place to live where your entire paycheck won’t be eaten up by housing costs.
An analysis from jobs site Glassdoor looked at the 50 biggest metro areas to see where your paycheck will go the furthest. To do so, the team compared local median salaries to local median home prices to come up with a cost of living ratio for each city. The higher the ratio, the better off you’d be financially.
If you want to get the most bang for your buck, you should consider looking for jobs in the Detroit area, according to Glassdoor, and you won’t have any luck on the West Coast. Here are the other 24 metro areas where your paycheck goes the furthest:
Glassdoor’s analysis doesn’t account for other living costs, such as transportation ― definitely a big one in Detroit, which has the highest rates for car insurance in the country.
“Though there are certainly other financial factors to consider when taking into account total cost of living, this data reinforces that pay typically goes further in mid-sized cities versus big metropolitan areas where there is often tighter competition for housing,” Andrew Chamberlain, Glassdoor chief economist, said in a statement.
Glassdoor determined the typical salary from reports users shared on the website from April 2015 to April 2016 ― at least 1,000 for each metro area. The median home prices come from the Zillow Home Value Index.
Nationwide, the biggest expenditure for families is housing, the Glassdoor report notes. About a third of Americans spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing costs, according to Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. Spending 30 percent or less of your income is the amount typically deemed affordable, meaning a third of the country is struggling to afford housing.
Now you know a few places where it might be less of a struggle.
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