Transcript
Clark Howard (0:00)
Get the Angel REEF Special at McDonald's. Now let's break it down. My favorite barbecue sauce, American cheese, crispy bacon, pickles, onions and a sesame seed bun, of course. And don't forget the fries and the drinks. Sound good?
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Clark Howard (0:50)
It's great to have you here on the Clark Howard Show. You know, our mission is to serve you with advice and information that empowers you so you make better financial decisions in your life. In today's episode, I saw a map of how far your money goes in different states depending on where you choose to live in the country. And some of it would be obvious to you. Hawaii is the most expensive place in the United States to live. But a lot of the things are not so obvious. I want to share some of this data to you. If you're somebody who has itchy feet and you're trying to figure out where's the most affordable place to live, I got the data for you. Also, I want to hit you with the latest on tariffs, what kind of things you need to be aware of because people are so confused about what tariffs are going to mean to our economy as we move through the year and more important, to your own wallet and the security of your own job. And I'll talk about that later. So I don't know if you've ever looked@visual capitalist.com they do wonderful research about various economics things and then distill them down into very simple charts or in this case a map of the United States. And they have taken data on and specifically they were looking at like how long would your money last in retirement? And so it's a scale that shows in this case they took a theoretical amount of money and said how long your money, including Social Security would allow you to live a typical lifestyle in that state. How many years could you. And as I told you in the lead that Hawaii is where your money goes the least far of any state. Everything's got to be brought in their islands, limited land, everything, housing, food, supplies, are all so expensive. But when you look at the rest of the United States, the mainland United States, there are such stark differences from place to place. Like, the most affordable place in the United States, where your money goes the furthest is in the state of West Virginia, which the reason that's interesting is that right next door in Virginia, it's a really expensive state to live in. I mean, Virginia is as expensive as living in Florida, which, by the way, is to me an interesting thing. Florida, your money doesn't go very far anymore. Florida used to be not only the Sunshine State, but it was an affordable state to live in. A lot of people who moved to Florida are now leaving Florida because the cost of living in Florida, even though there's no income tax, has gone up so much that people are leaving the state of Florida, and a lot of them are becoming what are known as halfbacks. What's a halfback? Halfbacks are referred to as people who moved to the Carolinas or Tennessee or Georgia, who maybe came from the Midwest or the Northeast and they went to Florida, and then they're like, well, can't quite dig this, but don't want to go back to where it was really cold. And money goes much further in the Carolinas and Tennessee and Georgia. And by the way, Tennessee has no state income tax like Florida. And by comparison, Texas, which has no state income tax, your money goes much further than it does in Florida. But when you look at the mainland U.S. you want to see where your money doesn't go anywhere. California and Massachusetts, Very, very, very, very expensive to live in. Why? Interestingly enough, not because of taxes, which you'd assume, but from my digging, even though taxes are high in Taxachusetts and they're moderately high in California, unless you're really rich and then they're really, really high in California, it's housing costs. And you look state after state. The big thing that makes a state unaffordable, Oregon, Washington, less expensive in California, but very expensive again because of housing costs. New York, crazy expensive because of housing costs and to a lesser extent, taxes. Affordable places to live. How about moving to, in addition to West Virginia and Mississippi, which are by far the cheapest. Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Kentucky, those are the real, real bargain states, although you may not want to live in them because part of life is about lifestyle, part is about cost. But this chart that you'll be able to link to from our notes and see the map of the 50 states and where it's more affordable to live, where it's more expensive to live I mean, some of these that are more affordable, I would not have expected Michigan and Ohio. I would have assumed. That's why you never want to assume. Right. That they would be more expensive places to live, but they're more affordable. So within a region of the country, there are big differences in cost of living from one state to another in the same region. Where would you move if you could move anywhere in the United States and it was not involving cost?