We all have a figure in our head when it comes to the ideal amount we'd like to be earning. For almost all of us, that figure is considerably more than we're earning right now! But as well as having a dream wage, we probably have a dream location, too.
Those two dreams may not correlate. If you're looking at your current environment and thinking that you could live very comfortably on $70K per year, you might be right. If you take that wage and move to California though, you may find that your money doesn't go all that far.
For the study, the personal finance website used data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the 50/30/20 budgeting rule - which allocates 50 percent of your income to necessities, 30 percent to discretionary expenses and 20 percent to savings - to find out what the average "living wage" is in each state.
