AROUND HOME : The Next Move

GEOGRAPHIC ASSESSOR is a program for all those people who are planning to leave Los Angeles but don’t know where they’re going as yet. With Geographic Assessor, they can determine which cities offer the best deal.

First you enter the city in which you’re currently living, then the place to which you may want to move and your current salary. The program then calculates what a similar job would pay in the new city and the cost of living there.

The result can be an eye-opener. If you are now living in Los Angeles, for instance, and making $50,000 a year, Geographic Assessor shows that you could move to Pittsburgh, Penn., and make $44,468 a year at a comparable job (89% of your current salary). But because the cost of living is only 72% of that in Los Angeles ($36,240), you’d have an extra $8,228 per year in disposable income. On the other hand, you want to avoid cities where the ratio between salary and expenses is less than one. In Boston, for example, the ratio is .88, meaning you would earn only $41,697 for a job that pays $50,000 in Los Angeles. At the same time, the cost of living in Boston would be $47,226, meaning you’d be $5,530 worse off than if you’d stayed in L.A.

The good cities are those in the old American heartland such as Pittsburgh (ratio of 1.23 of income over cost of living), Kansas City (1.15) and Cincinnati (1.15), and Pacific Northwest cities such as Seattle (1.03) and Portland (1.05). Cities to be shunned are those in New England and on the East Coast.

Geographic Assessor is a shareware program available for about $3 (program 735) from California Freeware; (805) 273-0300.