In any event, this generates a more detailed breakdown:
http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/savings/moving-cost-of-l...
A few interesting examples (I chose to compare to Brooklyn, since Manhattan was over the top ridiculous):
- Austin Brooklyn
Home Price $232,059.83 $944,473.13
Rent $926.30 $2,249.13
Doctor Visit $84.28 $105.09
Pizza $10.08 $11.33
Beer $8.43 $9.81
Ground Beef $2.54 $3.39
Weirdly, optometrists are way cheaper there (94$ vs 56$). Hmm... I'm going to have to co-ordinate my checkups with my vacations...
I own a 2 bedroom in Brooklyn (1200sqft) with view of the Ocean that's that is less expensive that the number on the top right by 150K$. I definitely think my place is "above average", so these numbers must be skewed by my neighbors that paid 2.7MM$ for an apartment the same size because it had a gold-plated ceiling (Russian Neighborhood).
One might be able to make some good comparisons about rent, since that's so heavily market-driven... but groceries? I find that the price of groceries varies so widely across any city, or hell, any neighborhood that one cannot possibly make a reasonable claim to "a bottle of beer costs $X", nor "a delivered pizza costs $Y".
Take where I'm right now for example - your link has the broad area "Seattle-Bellevue-Everett" - which covers every single neighborhood in Seattle, from the cheapest in the Central District all the way to the most expensive in Belltown. And then it moves north to heavily blue-collar areas like Everett and software-engineer-land like Bellevue.
How can any reasonable pricing index be established like that?
Just out of curiosity, was that $8/9 for a pint/litre of beer or a 4 pack. When I was in NYC last year I don't recall it being anywhere near that expensive.
The anecdotal warning goes double here, because the NYC lifestyle deemphasizes groceries.
Anecdotally, I recently took a road trip across the southwest and Fairway was cheaper than similar stores in Tucson, Flagstaff, Moab and Boulder. In Minneapolis things got cheap again but in Northern MN/ND they are about the same (as NYC).