Seems quite off for Seattle at least. They put housing costs for 1 adult 0 children at ~$18000, which last I checked barely covers rent for a studio, but no other housing-related expenses (like... water/sewer/electric, which isn't cheap here either).
First off, I see $38,817 not $18k. Where did you get that?
Second, this is for the whole Seattle/Tacoma area. This isn’t living in central Seattle.
Finally, I found it to be generous from my personal experience. My partner and I were able to live in Seattle for considerably less than $60k per year this gives for two people. We had a perfectly happy, frugal, life at around $36k.
> We had a perfectly happy, frugal, life at around $36k.
There's a tendency for people to think that anyone not living in a house with a white picket fence in Queen Anne must be insufferable.
It seems like there's a large group of people that is simply miserable if they don't have as much as others - regardless of if that thing is going to actually bring them any joy or not.
It seems like half my friends are killing themselves to buy a boat - and they don't even go out boating more than a couple times a year. I'll never get it.
As a kid in the 80s we owned close to nothing. But nobody did and we just made the best of it. I never felt poor because this simply was the living standard of the time and our objective needs were met.
It seems since then we simply invented a whole lot of extra "needs", which really are "wants".
It's also important to remember that it includes the neighborhoods you may not be so excited to live in where rents are going to be cheaper, driving down the average. I live in Chicago, my "living wage" is like $85,000/yr for a single guy with no kids, but my area also has a median rent of >$2000 and I need a 2nd bedroom to use as an office.
This stuff is so general as to be basically worthless beyond a comparison between areas, not as a datapoint to use when calculating the cost of living somewhere.
It looks like it's 40th percentile, which for the whole metro region, yea $1.5k for a studio makes sense even after you add in utilities. So much closer to median cost.
$1.5k with $100-$200 of utilities, renters insurance, etc in Seattle proper gets a little more difficult to find. You could probably do it up north past greenwood, over in west seattle, or similar. If you know how to dodge the craigslist scams haha.
I'm curious about this. How many years ago was this, and would you be willing to divulge the general vicinity of the neighbourhood you rented or lived in?
Yes, that's "living", nothing more. A home. It even says in the technical documentation, "We assumed that a one adult family would rent a single
occupancy unit (zero bedrooms) for an individual adult household"
I can't account for your thoughts on utilities, the site says the housing includes them, but perhaps there's room to improve the data.
As sibling commenter pointed out, typing "Seattle" doesn't yield results for Seattle, but rather the whole Seattle/Tacoma metro area, which includes several places that you can get a $1500 studio plus utilities in.
I checked for Bellingham, which is where I most recently lived in WA -- where it suggests two adults could get by on less than $1000/mo. in rent. Quite unlikely. Ten years ago, my rent for a 400 sq. ft. studio apartment in Bellingham was $850/mo. It's more like $1200/mo now. And that's assuming it's reasonable to expect two adults to share 400 sq. ft.
The childcare costs seem a little suspect too.
Still a cool idea.