Best cities for saving
Frugal living can be a great way to manage and grow your money. No matter what stage of life you’re in, it’s helpful to have a budget and stick to it each month. Some cities are better suited than others for keeping your spending in check. The Zebra looked at the 50 most-populated U.S. cities to find out where it’s easiest to live on a budget.
We looked at four separate data points to analyze the budget-friendliness of each city.
- Median home price: With housing prices skyrocketing across the country, we looked at which cities had the lowest median sales price. Data was from Realtor.com’s third quarter of 2022. For reference, the national median sales price for this period was $398,500, according to the National Association of Realtors.[1]
- Average annual cost of car insurance: The cost of car insurance varies dramatically by city. The Zebra’s data reveals the average annual price by city.
- Average healthcare expenditures per capita by state: Data compiled from the Kaiser Family Foundation reveals how much private and public funding is spent on residents yearly. The country’s healthcare spending is among the highest in the world, making affordable programs extremely important.[2]
- Online “free stuff” group membership: Social media marketplaces are convenient for buying, selling, and trading about anything. There are also plenty of “free stuff” and “buy nothing” groups to avoid heavy spending when you don’t want to. We ranked each city by the membership size of their largest Facebook group.
Why these four data points? We focused on some of the largest line items in most budgets: housing, insurance and healthcare costs while also taking into account “free stuff” that can lower personal spending.
Methodology
The Zebra pulled four data points to analyze the top 50 MSAs (by population) in the U.S. that make it easy to live on a budget.
- Median home price: National Association of Realtors’ Q3 2022 data
- Average monthly cost of car insurance: The Zebra
- Healthcare expenditures per capita by state: Kaiser Family Foundation
- Online “free stuff” group membership: Pulled from Facebook (as of January 2023)
MSA data was used where applicable, and we sometimes substituted city or state data as necessary.