Living Where You Can Get the Most for Your Dollar

CNN Money has added a cost of living calculator to their website where you can do comparisons of how far your current income would stretch in other US cities. This is a great tool for identifying potential location-based business opportunities (geoarbitrage). I ran my info through and it looks like I am clearly better off being permanently located where I am in North Carolina, based on cost of living elsewhere in the nation. On average a dollar will stretch 3 times as far in NC as compared to Manhattan (no surprise there). But it was interesting to find that dollars in NC would go 1.25 times as far as they would in Maine or Oregon.