Comment by plakspin
18 days ago
I looked up the average cost of living in Alabama. It says it is 54k for a family. Do you think that is realistic? The reason why I ask is that US incomes always confuse me. Incomes seem quite high and I understand that taxes are much lower than here (Finland). As an uninformed outsider with these costs of living 100k for a couple seems quite nice and a gross income 130k appears absolutely rich. Am I missing something? IlJust very curious always as some of the income programmers with my experience get in the US seem absolutely unachievable here.
The numbers made my eyes jump out a little, though I need to remember that "six figures" when I was a ten would be over $250,000 now, a few decades later.
And I'm in the U.S., Pennsylvania instead of Alabama, though they should be similar. (COL site says PA is 20% more expensive on average.)
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/opportunity...
Of note, Alabama is one of the cheapest states to live in nationally. I would think that a $100K USD income would still allow for a healthy amount of extravagance and savings, though that would require financial literacy.
An easy way to check is look up basket prices. Average rent in America is quite high, food costs are high, tipping culture and other fees make food delivery an expensive venture. 100k for 2 people is a lot of money on a global ecale, but it's not really "rich" in the US unless you spend extremely smart for many years.
The cost of living (and everything else) varies wildly in the United States. Finland is maybe analogous to Rhode Island—not Massachusetts (Sweden) or Connecticut (Norway), but close. Alabama is then more like Albania—quite a bit cheaper… but do you want to live there?
(Sorry to all the Albanians, it’s not really fair to compare you to Alabama.)
Childcare and healthcare costs are really the big two.
100k is an awesome salary for a young single adult in most of the country.
100k is much less awesome when you pay $3200/m for daycare for two kids, and $890/m for family health insurance.
Yeah, childcare costs are absolutely brutal nowadays. We are lucky enough to be able to hire a nanny 3 days a week with grandparents caring for them 2 days a week with young children. Daycare costs so much that this situation ends up being cost competitive.
Cost of living in my Texas city is about 10% lower than the national average, but I have friends shelling out $1400/month for 1 child. That's more than my mortgage payment from a house we got in 2020.
I haven't done looked at the FRED graphs, but I wonder how much people leaving the labor force due to the math not working out for childcare costs is happening.
I am sure these numbers seem kind of low to folks living in high cost of living areas, but the median household income here is just over $60K.
Maybe for rural Alabama, but not for Auburn. I think Auburn has the state's second highest cost of living, second only to Madison.
My two-bedroom apartment is now $1400 per month, and that's for a decent but not exactly nice apartment.
I could never support myself and my son on $54k here in Auburn.