Five million or so U.S. workers toil from home for the majority of their work hours, various studies report, and the number is rising.
According to one recent survey, seven in 10 freelancers said they would consider moving and are interested in options other than a large city. I’ll walk you through how to estimate your purchasing power in other locales, plus other considerations you’ll want to review. Let’s look at an example that shows how moving can boost your bank account.
Silicon Valley-to-Austin: $100,000 in Mountain View, Calif., after your tax burden and cost of living is actually worth $53,989. In Austin, it’s worth $70,752. So, you can afford a place to live — Austin real estate is lots cheaper — and you’ll get Austin’s quirky startup and music culture.
To make your own comparison, pick city candidates for relocation and do the math:
Taxes: The Tax Foundation website helpfully ranks states by their state and local tax burden. It also provides an annual analysis of income tax rates, for insight into where rates are going down and where they recently went up.
Cost of living: A Google search of “cost of living by metro area” will give you a sense of whether you’re getting the best bang for your buck in any region. To look at the country as a whole, the Tax Foundation has produced an interactive map on purchasing power using federal Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
Here are a few more things you’ll want to factor into your quality of life considerations.
Schools: If you have kids and want access to quality public education, you might be willing to sacrifice a bit in taxes or purchasing power. I use Greatschools.org data to look at things like test scores and demographics.
Transportation: If you drive a lot for your job, you don’t want to move to an area that is behind on maintaining its roads and bridges. The American Society of Civil Engineers tracks that and other related stats. If you want to ditch your car, or if access to transit is important to you, you’ll want to see which areas of the country have the most reliable systems. You could read Christof Spieler’s “Trains, Buses, People: An Opinionated Atlas of U.S. Transit,” or you could check out the news outlet CityLab for a summary and handy chart of top-performing transit systems.
Airports are also a consideration. Forbes ranks the nation’s top airports for on-time flights and traveler experience. And you can drill down with the Bureau of Transportation Statistics’ Airport Snapshots.
Don’t forget the internet: While eight in 10 Americans have a broadband subscription, that average goes way down in rural areas. The U.S. Census Bureau has mapped those rates, and it’s easy to see that there are large swaths of the country that have a low share of internet subscribers. While it doesn’t mean the internet isn’t available — after all, that’s what satellite internet companies are for — it does mean that a high-speed internet package with unlimited data and super-fast processing might be out of reach. If that’s important to your job — or your late-night Netflix binges — it’s worth checking if you’re eyeing a lower-cost area with a broadband subscription rate under 85 percent.
The bottom line is, telecommuting is poised to grow rapidly. An estimated 57 million Americans are freelancing. Of those, 28 percent now do it full time, but even more (50 percent) say they view freelancing as a long-term career rather than a side gig. So if you have a mobile job, you have a huge opportunity to give yourself a pay raise and boost your quality of life by packing up and changing cities. But make sure you do your research first.
