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Comment by daenz | Hacker News Reader

Here in Washington, a Seattle salary of $150k is worth around $315k in Spokane. And that's in the same state.

https://www.bestplaces.net/cost-of-living/spokane-wa/seattle...

The cost of living scaling doesn’t cover the entire salary. Only about 30% of my salary goes towards cost of living, more than half of it goes to savings. If my salary was scaled from Seattle to Spokane levels, my savings at retirement would be enormously impacted.

That sort of cost of living also doesn’t account for a huge amount of other things too. Having a holiday in Bali costs the same whether you depart from Spokane or Seattle (probably slightly more departing from Spokane actually, when you account for transport from Spokane to SeaTac). Buying a new 4K big screen costs the same in Spokane as it does in Seattle. Living in Spokane doesn’t make your kids college cost less either.

Agreed, that bestplaces COLA calculator is bizarre. On one hand I think it's great that it breaks down relative costs by area - like you say, it's clear the difference in cost between Spokane and Seattle is almost entirely due to housing.

But then it fails to take into account the percentage of income that actually goes towards housing. If you make 200k and move to a place where the primary difference is housing costs (say 2x housing costs), the adjustment should be up to about 250k (assuming housing ~25% of income), not 400k.

> Living in Spokane doesn’t make your kids college cost less either.

It would depend on how much of a pay cut you experience moving to Spokane, but that can certainly make colleges with extensive need-based aid cheaper.

When you're talking at the levels that most engineering positions are paid pretty much anywhere in the US (even lower cost of living areas), you are unlikely to qualify for need-based aid anyways. A pay cut from (lets say) 200 -> 150 is significant, but I don't believe likely to qualify a student as "low income" by any means.

Stanford covers all tuition for parents whose income is $125k or less, and partial tuition for parents making more than that until some cutoff. Regardless, $150k would be getting you a decent bit of financial aid.

I don’t think “your pay cut might be big enough to qualify you for financial aid” is a typical part of the WFH sale pitch, in any case.

The cost of a new Tesla, toilet paper, or chicken is not twice as much in Seattle. This is basically true for housing only

Not just housing. Food, child care, services, bars, etc., are significantly cheaper. My kid’s private school an hour east of DC costs 1/3 less than the going right inside DC. Daycare is 30% cheaper. A cocktail is somewhat more than half the price.

As odd as it might sound, child care and private schools line up with housing prices in an area, so it can be ideal to think of them as the same category. Likewise utility bills can be inflated to.

Other costs are not much higher if at all. If you go to a bar in the financial district, that's usually a business expense so it's justifiably expensive. It's this way in all cities or towns with a large enough center though, so pricing come out somewhat equal. It's when you compare city center prices with outskirts of city prices where the difference starts to matter more.

> Here in Washington, a Seattle salary of $150k is worth around $315k in Spokane. And that's in the same state.

Spokane and Seattle are on opposite sides of the state - 280-300 miles apart. I don't get what you're trying to get at. The distance is large enough to go through multiple states on the east coast. I don't think it's really an apt comparison since the two are nothing like each other. You could make this same comparison in CA with a SF Bay Area salary and even less distance apart. Here's one for you: https://www.bestplaces.net/cost-of-living/redding-ca/palo-al...

> Spokane and Seattle are on opposite sides of the state

All that matters is that Facebook consider them within the same CoL-adjusted region. If their CoL weighting is applied at the state-level (for example if Washington residents are to be paid at 80% the effective SF salary), then this is the real arbitrage.

Sounds about right. You'd have to pay me at least $150k extra before I'd consider living in the 8th circle of Hell, Spokane.

I haven't lived there. What has been your experience?

All the bad parts of San Francisco with none of the redeeming qualities.

So this depends on how they compute this. If it's not that granular you might be able to live in a low cost location that is ranked as a higher cost location by the FB "salary grid".

Having that grid information would be very useful to an individual when negotiating.

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