Finding a place to live after leaving prison is not an easy task. Not only does it have to be somewhere that you’ll feel comfortable, but it also has to be a city or town you can afford. You’ll need to balance wages with the cost of food, housing and transportation.
There’s a vast difference between various regions and cities in the U.S., and a cost-of-living calculator can help eliminate some of the guesswork as you explore places you may want to settle down in.
The information they provide will help you determine whether you’ll make enough money to live a basic life in whatever city you choose and/or what type of work to prepare for.
A cost-of-living calculator can tell you everything from the pay per hour you would need to support yourself – and your family if you have one – to the price of housing, transport and even individual food items.
Examples of cost-of-living calculators
There are quite a few free calculators available online. These are among our favorites:
MIT Living Wage Calculator – This calculator determines the living wage for 12 situations ranging from one working adult with no children to two working adults with three children. It covers 3,144 counties and 387 metropolitan areas across the U.S. and offers statewide statistics as well. You just click on a state, then a county or metropolitan area to access the information.
This cost-of-living calculator also includes a list of typical expenses – food, childcare, medical, housing and transportation – as well as the required annual income before taxes needed to support a basic lifestyle in each area, so people will know how much they will need to earn. Most of the statistics are a year or two old, but they still provide a fairly accurate picture.
For example, a single working adult in the Chicago metropolitan area will need a required annual income of $53,667 before taxes. In Miami that figure is $53,793, and in New York it’s $65,510.
Salary.com Cost of Living Calculator – With this tool, you can put in a type of work and your current city (or any city). When you enter a new location, the tool will display the cost-of-living change and the estimated salary change in your new city.
Say you work as a carpenter and want to move from St. Louis to Chicago. The cost of living will increase 14.8%, while the salary will only go up 7%.
Payscale Cost of Living Calculator – Payscale’s calculator takes the comparison one step further by providing more information. Just type in a city and an annual salary, and it displays 25 cities and an arrow showing whether the cost of each of them would be higher or lower than the city you entered. Click on one of them, and you will find the median home price and rent, as well as the cost of utilities, healthcare and grocery items.
Bankrate Cost of Living Comparison Calculator – This tool provides a side-by-side comparison of the cost of housing, transportation, utilities, healthcare, and a vast variety of individual grocery items and miscellaneous expenses for whatever two cities that are entered. It would be difficult to find a more detailed resource.
Putting It All Together
None of these calculators can tell you exactly what your life will look like in a new city, but together they can help you rule places in or out before you commit to a move. A good approach is to start a broad search with the MIT calculator to see whether a metro area is even in the realm of possibility for the kind of work you’re pursuing.
Then you can narrow it down with Salary.com or Payscale once you have a specific job offer or job type in mind. And then you can finally use Bankrate if you’re choosing between two or three finalist cities and want to see the numbers side by side.
It’s also worth remembering that these calculators show averages across an entire metro area, and costs can vary significantly between neighborhoods within the same city. A number that looks out of reach citywide may still be workable in a specific, more affordable part of town, especially if it puts you closer to a job, family or a support system you rely on. If you’re working with a counselor or organization that knows the area, they may also have on-the-ground knowledge of specific neighborhoods and housing options that these calculators can’t capture.
The goal is not to find a place that’s cheap. It’s to find a place where you can actually build a stable life. That means work you can grow into, housing you can sustain and enough money left over to breathe. Take the time to run the numbers before you move. It’s a lot easier to plan for a tough year than to be surprised by one.
