For example, I live in California. Why is it expensive in California?
Because so many people want to live here. Why do they want to live here?
Climate. Ocean. Every type of place on Earth (which is why Hollywood moved here for filming in the early 1900s).
However, why is it so expensive? With so much demand for California property everything property wise is very very expensive, especially in San Francisco which likely is the biggest beautiful city in the state. So, if a business owner has to pay a high price for his business then he has to pass on the cost to you as the customer. And so demand: land, businesses, desire to live here is so great it makes this state one of the most expensive to live in. Also, the highest concentration of millionaires on earth is now in Silicon Valley.
How much $100 is really worth in each state
Nothing diminishes the value of a dollar quite like your ZIP code. In a fascinating look at the cost of living in all 50 states and hundreds of metropolitan areas, the Tax Foundation shows exactly how much — and how little — 100 bucks is worth depending where you live.
California and New York
are among the worst states for greenback carriers — $100 in each state
is worth just $89.05 and $86.73, respectively. But they have competition
from high-priced Washington, D.C., where $100 is worth only $84.96.
Cash goes much further in the pockets of Southerners and
Midwesterners, where the cost of living tends to be much lower,
according to the report, which is based on Bureau of Economic Analysis
data from 2013. Residents can buy much more in Mississippi with $100 than any other state ($115.21), followed closely by South Dakota, where $100 is worth $114.16. Ohio is another low-price state, where $100 is $111.61.
“You could think of this as meaning that Ohioans are, for the purposes of day-to-day living, 11% richer than their incomes suggest,” says the report, co-authored by economists Scott Drenkard and Alan Cole.
Things get more interesting when the Tax Foundation homed in on purchasing power in individual metropolitan areas. In the map below, the yellow areas mark cities where $100 carries the least value. The Northeast and California, as to be expected, had the most yellow areas.
Take New York, for example, one
of the most expensive states in the Tax Foundation’s first analysis.
Once you get outside of the notoriously high-priced New York City
metropolitan area, purchasing power greatly improves. In Albany, $100 is
worth about $101 and jumps to $106 in Buffalo.
In
addition to New York, the states with the greatest price variation were
California, Illinois, Virginia, and Florida. The starkest difference:
in Chicago, $100 is worth $93.81, and in Danville, Ill., it comes to
$126.26.
The
trend repeats around densely populated cities like Seattle and
Minneapolis, where your dollar’s value climbs the further away you
travel. There were some anomalies however. Cities that have more lax
zoning restrictions and lots of flat land for development could
potentially be cheaper than some rural areas, says Cole.
He
cites Houston as an example, where $100 mostly still holds its value
($99.40) despite its big size. Compared to other big cities like New
York ($81.77) and San Francisco ($83.13), it’s substantially cheaper.
“If you look at some smaller cities, you can do even better,” Cole
says. “For example, Cincinnati ($110.50) manages to find plenty of room
to expand both up and out, and maintains substantially
cheaper-than-average prices.”
Differences
in the relative value of cash in cities and states have major
implications for federal and state tax and minimum wage policies, which
are based on income, the Tax Foundation notes. “If real incomes vary
from place to place due to purchasing power, this matters for those
policies,” they write.
Do you live in an expensive city? We'd love to hear how you manage your budget. E-mail us at yfmoneymailbag@yahoo.com.
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end quote from:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/how-much-100-is-really-worth-in-each-state-194305774.html
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