Moving to California - calculating the cost
We’ve been here a little while now, and are getting moved in. Now that the dust is settling, I’m getting a feel for exactly what the cost differences are between rural New Mexico (Magdalena) and urban California (Alameda).
I’ll admit this is fairly unscientific - there’s only a little bit of data here, and it is still early.
Most of my info here is proportional instead of absolute, but here’s a sense of scale: Socorro County has an average family income of $29,544, compared to Alameda’s $65,587. Alameda is basically a small town in the shadow of Oakland, so it’s not as service-centric as some of the surrounding city areas like San Francisco. (SF’s average family income is $67,809, but with much higher housing costs, so Alameda works out to be a little cheaper.)
So, at first blush, you’d think that salaries between the two locations roughly double to maintain par, right? Sure, that’s about it, give or take a little. If salaries roughly double, pretty much everything else could too, while keeping the same standard of living. Let’s take a look:
1. Gas - Actually, right now, NM has higher gas prices than California. That’s unusual. In general, CA is higher on average, by about 7%.
However: Alameda is bike friendly and has public transportation. So, the car is getting used much less. We sold one car off, so there’s no more depreciation there, no gas for it, no repairs, no insurance, no parking fees, etc. Where we were commuting and spending ~$6/day in gas, plus wear on the car, now Jen’ll use the bus at $3.50/day. The truck remains, which is handy, but with less wear, less gas/oil/repair cost.
Winner: CA
2. Internet - We went from satellite at $60/month to a cable modem at $30/month. Speed and latency are much improved (~20x improvement), but the service worked the same in both places, basically. Those not on satellite in Magdalena usually had DSL, which had comparable costs with land line and ISP requirements.
Winner: CA
3. Food - this one seems to be a tie. Socorro tended to have a markup on food that puts it on par with Alameda costs. I’m not even counting the Magdalena markup, that would put it off the charts. (That could be as much as 2x the Socorro markup.)
However: In Alameda we actually have selection and a lot of variety. There’s a Trader Joe’s that doesn’t take 3 hours round trip to get to, plus ~20 or so in gas. The produce selection is respectable. There’s a Chinese market through the Posey Tube. (Again, that’s not a trip to Albuquerque.)
Winner: CA
4. Insurance - I don’t have comparable data here yet - auto insurance will go up a bit on the truck, but down overall since we can get by with one car. We’re renting, so we only have renter’s insurance rather than housing insurance, which is of course cheaper, but not a good comparison. Based on propery taxes, I would expect home insurance to be higher here, ludicrous if you want or can get earthquake coverage. (Update - it’s about 10 bucks a month more total in CA to insure the truck. So a slight gain, but much less than what we would pay with two cars. Shameless plug - Progressive is a great company to work with, they’re really easy to interact with and were really great when a freak hailstorm pretty much totalled both of our vehicles in NM a few years back.)
Winner: Unknown
5. Housing - Ah, here we go. Yeah, housing’s insane here. We went from 1600 sq ft on .5 acres to ~500 square feet. Cost nearly doubled, in line with the salary increase, but for an incomparable result. If you buy an equivalent house here, it’s easy to spend $3000/month for 30 years to compare to what I paid $500/month for a 12 year mortgage. We’ve kept the cost in line with salary, but it would be easy to get out of control. (Rentals can be $2500 if you want a big cookie cutter place.)
Winner: NM, by a long shot.
6. Utilities - There’s not a whole lot of data here yet, but overall, it looks like costs are reasonable. The rental owner covers a few services, so they’re actually built into the housing cost. Power is more expensive here ($0.13/kWh compared to $0.09/kWh in NM) but we’re likely to use less in our small space, overall. Gas prices will probably follow a similar trend in the winter - heating 500sq feet is cheaper than 1600sq feet. Telecom costs are unknown - we don’t have a land line. Cell phone costs are down, but not comparably - I’m using my work line, Jen’s on a simpler plan. Data networks here are of course much better, but we probably won’t use them directly.
Winner: CA, by a bit due to lower energy requirements in a smaller space? Need more data.
So, overall, housing is the big blip here, but it’s on par with salary, albeit for a reduced space. Nearly everything else here is in favor of CA. There are a lot of factors not considered, but these make up the bulk of expenditures overall, so it’s a good first look at the data. Keep in mind this is in a city with decent services and pretty low crime rates - moving to a more suburban area or other city could cause transportation or insurance price spikes.