I like St. Louis, but then I was from Florida originally and was glad to leave.
Compared to, say, Chicago, traffic is far lighter and less aggressive, parking is easy, there’s plenty of great places for food and culture and stuff, and it’s generally cheaper.
This site puts STL at $3170, but then they also have a $1250 rent for a 3BR apartment “outside city center.” But the mortgage on my 3BR house with a huge kitchen and big back yard is a little over $700 and is about a 10 minute drive to work. As always, I wonder how much of the metro area they are counting or if it’s literally just the city limits.
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Author here. Actually, the slider has a lower limit so that you can easily filter out some of the really cheap places that appear in some searches. If you were so inclined, you can eliminate most of the results for countries that aren’t super developed by just setting a floor of $1K or so. Saves a lot of time versus putting the country names into the exclude filter, which would be another way to accomplish the same thing.
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Hey there, I’m the author. Bear in mind that rent is usually more expensive than a mortgage, because most landlords prefer to turn a profit and often/usually have their own mortgage to pay. Comparing one to the other is sort of comparing apples to oranges.
$1250 looks about in-line with CraigsList listings for STL for 3+ beds outside of the downtown area. Obviously this is an averaged value, and you’re always at the mercy of the contributors when the prices are crowdsourced-- an “acceptable” apartment might be $800/mo for one person, while the next could live in no less than a $1500/mo palace. With enough data points, you tend to arrive at a decent average. However, these kinds of things are why I offer the lifestyle setting, which adjusts the total budgets up and down by a multiplier to account for things that aren’t on the limited list of crowdsourced budget items, and to account for people’s personal lifestyles. I won’t go into all the nerdy details, but if you’re interested, the detailed budgeting methodology is in the FAQ. Hope you had a fun time playing around with it.
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It has improved since then.
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Hey, Mindy. I’m the author of the site. I wanted to let you know that I made the opt-out more basic (“No thanks, maybe later.”) Though only a few people have been bothered by it, all I’ve got right now is my relationship with visitors (the site makes no money at the moment). The goal was never to insult anyone, just to establish a light tone. Someone sent along some articles for me to read, and I heard the feedback loud and clear.
I’m guessing you visited while we were frontpaged by Reddit and absolutely melted into the ground. The site has recovered, so maybe you’ll take a shot and try it out sometime here. Thanks for your feedback.
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Thanks a lot for the update and the engagement! Good luck with the site!
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