CNN has a cost of living calculator that seems to take grocery , housing, utility, transportation, and healthcare factors into account.
http://cgi.money.cnn.com/tools/costofliving/costofliving.htm...
107,798 in SF would be 73,278 in Minneapolis
http://cgi.money.cnn.com/tools/costofliving/costofliving.htm...
107,798 in SF would be 73,278 in Minneapolis
At both Sun and NetApp where I was familiar with the compensation practices there was a 'modifier' applied to bay area jobs which increased their compensation, but even with the modifier the 'net' take home pay was less than it was elsewhere.
That said, when I was at Google they had a really interesting pay practice for engineers which consists of a base salary and a 'bonus', the bonus was affected by a personal multiplier and a company multiplier. The system was designed to make it impossible to figure out what the multipliers were so basically is simplified to the old fashion 'tweak the folks we like' non-accountability that you got elsewhere but it certainly gave the impression to people that they were going to earn more money than they actually did. (And yes, it annoyed me, but Lazlo Bock the VP of HR didn't really care that it did :-) Perhaps when they did that whole 10% across the board thing they normalized things a bit (which would have been a good thing, the old system was causing good people to quit when it should have been rewarding them)
One has to distinguish cost of living for a non-saver from cost-of-living for a saver.
Look, as someone said elsewhere, this is an impossible problem. You have too many factors to figure out. Have a family? Want to own a house instead of rent? Do you need a car? What lifestyle do you maintain?
The point here is that we're trying to assess what it would cost to maintain a similar standard of living in two different cities. Food. Transportation costs. Housing. Rents. Healthcare. Forget 52" TVs and trips to Paris for the time being.
>> what it would cost to maintain a similar standard of living in two different cities.
Someone who saves $20k/year or spends large amounts on travel would have a much higher standard of living in SF than Minneapolis.
"I have a wife and two kids. I want to own a 3 bedroom house with a yard. I need a car, and I drive 15,000 miles a year. We eat <x> number of meals at home each week, and <y> at restaurants. We do <z> things as a family including movies. This takes up 80% of our net income."
Okay, now what would that cost in Minneapolis, and what would that cost in San Francisco? That's all we're trying to ask.