When you know it's time to move away from the Lytton Park area but you've got quite a few options as to where you might want to live instead, making a decision can be a daunting prospect. There are a number of factors that should influence your decision, but the one foremost in your mind should be the cost of living. Why? Because it will help you determine whether you and your family can afford to live there or not. This article should help you understand how Worcester, Massachusetts compares to other cities in terms of cost of living.
What is cost of living?
Cost of living is exactly what it sounds like: how much money it takes the average family or individual to support themselves. A number of factors go into cost of living calculations. If you were determining the figure for Rosedale, for instance, you might take into account the cost of a home for sale in Rosedale, the property taxes, how much it costs to buy groceries, pay cable, water, and power bills, and other necessary expenses such as owning a car, purchasing fuel oil, or paying membership fees in a homeowners' association.
How to Compare
There's no hard and fast rule for calculating cost of living, so you'll probably see a number of different figures for Worcester on different websites, so make sure whatever comparisons you make are based on the same figure. For our purposes, we will use the Cost of Living Index. It places the national average at 100 and expresses all cities comparatively with that number. The higher the number, the less you can expect to have left over from your wages to buy things like a new instantaneous water heater or to take trips, save, or spend on entertainment.
Worcester
Although it hasn't made the top 100 list of best American small cities to live in the past few years, owning a home with a Sutton mortgage is still more affordable here than in many similarly sized places in the United States. The cost of living index for the city is 102, slightly above the national average. The average family makes about $41,000 per year.
Comparatively
It's only really fair to compare cities of the same size, since large cities tend to be very expensive and small towns less expensive. So how does Worcester compare to other cities of its size? The border town of Brownsville, Texas is only 77 while Little Rock, Arkansas is a more modest 91. Newport News, Virginia, a city with a lot of industry and pneumatic conveying systems sits at 97. Sunny Fort Lauderdale, Florida is at 114, while Oxnard, California is a whopping 126.
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