A useful new tool to help you choose where you live

[ad_1]

From time to time, New York Times Provides us with a great new personal financial management tool.As early as 2007, they created an amazing Rent and buy calculator, They have been working hard to update and maintain for the past fifteen years.A few weeks ago, they announced their Where should you live? tool. [Warning: possible paywall, which is unfortunate.]

This is how it works:

We created a quiz using data from nearly 17,000 locations in more than 30 indicators. Realtor.com shares room prices with us; Yelp provides statistics on restaurants, music venues, and gay bars; AccuWeather helps us collect statistics on temperature, sunshine, and snowfall, just to name a few of our sources.

We hope that the quiz will be useful for anyone considering moving—not just wealthy, highly educated people who work remotely because of the Covid pandemic. We have included data on affordability, work and abortion rights, which may be relevant for young people to decide where to start their careers. We have quantified the quality of health care, snowfall, and crime rates—standards that may be the primary considerations for retirees.

To use this tool, you need to choose from 35 different factors that are important to most people, ranging from population density to climate to ethnic diversity to political affiliation. You can even emphasize the qualities that are most important to you. The tool will tell you which U.S. cities best suit your preferences.

If you want, you can optimize the results by specifying a region (west, midwest, south, or northeast) and/or average cost of living in the country.

Once you are satisfied with the search results, you can click on each city to get a detailed description of its demographic data. If you like a place, you can “favorite” it to save it as a favorite. Then, when you are done, you can click “Compare&heart;” to see a table that puts all your favorite cities side by side.

For example, here is the result of my personal life preferences.

I don’t know anything about my top game (Vestal, New York State), but the rest of the results are almost accurate. In order to get a better match, a tool like this needs to include some kind of statistics to measure the vitality of the city center (for me, it is important to find a city with a stable city center rather than a city with commercial close to highways and highways. ) And statistics that measure the level of education.

If Kim and I had this tool when we were looking for a new place last summer, we would use it to help filter possible locations. In fact, we did reasonable work and chose a place to live. As you can see, Corvallis matches my preferences 75%.

Corvallis results

and three Among the top ten results on my list—Sequim and Port Angeles in Washington, Florence, Oregon—are towns that we seriously considered during our search. Two other towns in my top ten (Grass Valley and Eureka in California) were also on my list, but King excluded them because she didn’t want to live in California.

I realize that for most people, this tool is just a fun pastime. Unless you really want to take action, you currently have nothing to do with the result.However, I think it’s worth bookmarking for you next time Yes Try to decide where to live.

If you want to see the raw data behind this tool, check out the article explaining the method: “How do we calculate where we live”.

[The New York Times: Where should you live?]

[ad_2]

Source link