Quote:
Originally Posted by OrdoSeclorum
The numbers you've list show the Chicago family spending about $860 a month more than the Nashville family, assuming they went ahead and sprung for the $400,000 house and paid more taxes.
That's not nothing! Two working adults would each need to earn about $5,160 more per year in Chicago to make up for it. If you cared about nothing else than dollars and cents, there would need to be more or better job opportunities in Chicago to justify living here versus Nashville.
...unless that family owned one car in Chicago and needed two in Nashville. That single metric flips the cost benefit in Chicago's favor. Cars are extremely expensive!
Personally, I like visiting Nashville. And I really like the Smokey Mountains as a place for recreation. But it would take a LOT more than a few thousand dollars a year for me to give Chicago's airport connectivity and abundance of cultural activity (completely ignoring career prospects.) And in Chicago I say "hi" to my mailman when I'm walking my dog around 5:00. I walk to buy coffee in the morning or a bottle of wine for dinner, as needed, and don't need to get into a 6000 pound machine to do it. I walk to my dentist. In the summer, kids fill the sidewalk to buy stuff at the corner store when school gets out.
Even if I would save some money in Nashville or Northwest Indiana, there's a tremendous cost to replacing a walkable lifestyle with one that largely consists of trips from parking lot to parking lot. I have a couple friends who moved to the Detroit burbs for specifically this kind of financial calculation and are looking to move back to Chicago. They thought they would save some money, but both have ended up earning substantially less in Detroit than they expected and they hate that their life has been reduced to endless trips to Walmart or Target.
|
Absolutely. As Marothisu mentioned, everyone's situation is different. Incomes change over time, people have kids, cars are needed (or not), cars a paid off, homes are paid off, kids are off to college...etc. etc.
Hell, my situation is quite different today than it was when I first moved to Chicago. My wants and needs have changed over time also.