There are people living for less everywhere. We’ve lived in both the Bay Area and Sierra Madre CA for FAR less than most people think is possible in those areas. We did so by compromising on all sorts of things- no heat or air? Ok! Three bedrooms that barely fit the beds alone? Perfect! In the places we’ve lived we have dealt with no potable water, ants, spiders (think arachnophobia- my younger daughter actually has ptsd from that one), slanted floors that made it impossible to use spaces properly, no cooking ability in the home… when you need to spend less and you’re in a high col area (and don’t have a choice to move) there are always options- they’re the places no one else wants to rent.
I think everyone (myself included) is susceptible to seeing advantages/benefits others have and not recognizing their own. The grass is always greener.
I live in a very low COL area. If low COL was a great thing, then we should be turning everyone away. The opposite is true. We don’t have money for anything here. Our Ec Dev office can’t beg companies enough to relocate. We don’t have the workforce and the workforce won’t want to relocate. Yes, my house would be worth MANY millions in the NYC area. I will own it shortly. But, if I put it on the market today, I could not sell it within 5 years for $200,000, so what good is owning it? It also makes retiring elsewhere difficult. I console myself with “We did not buy an investment. We bought a home. We love our (110 year old) house and my family has loved living in it.”
You want to shop at Costco, TJ, Whole Foods, REI, or any grocery store with a basic salad bar? Be prepared to drive 50 miles each way. When I had my kids 20 years ago, there were ZERO licensed day care facilities for kids < 2. Not just booked. Did not exist. Everything was under the table and unlicensed. Most on CC would cringe if they walked into the local HS.
Each year, our paper prints all gov’t and school district salaries over $50K. It’s not as long of a list as you might think. If you go to $100K, I think < 10 people make that in our local government. So while you can afford a bigger house (I had to edit out nice, because almost all of our houses pre-date 1985!), anything extra can be tough because those costs are the same for everyone. A cheap flight for your family somewhere might cost 2x your mortgage. A basic car is half your yearly salary. If we were on my H’s teacher’s health insurance, it would be 35% of his pre-tax income. A new teacher would spend 50%. And yet, FASFA thinks we can pay $30,000/year. LOL.
But what do you get? No keeping up with the Jones’. Kids who can appreciate what they do have and what education can bring, because so many of their friends do not. Teachers who appreciate kids and parents who care. Teachers who live in the neighborhood and are like family. A couple of teachers have traveled to his school and taken him out to lunch. When he studied abroad, he sent them postcards. And it does not stop with teachers. My kids could wander the supermarket alone at a young age. The employees were like family and looked out for them. They made them special cakes, noticed if we missed a week, and would even periodically empty the foreign money coin bin from the machine and give them the contents. Same with mechanics, contractors, etc. You tend to be able to trust them, because they know your friends & family. I guess it comes down to family, and not just the blood kind.
Sometimes it’s good for me to write this out, because it is easy to forget sometimes. It’s easier to see the negative over the positive. We all want better for ourselves and especially our children. It can be frustrating when things don’t always seem fair. We always want what someone else has, right?
@overbearingmom we live in a smallish house in an expensive area and it is worth almost a million new. We can’t afford to buy anything bigger in our area.
@ClassicMom98 - There are lots of great things about living in a LCOL area. I wouldn’t trade the rural Midwest for either of the coasts or big city life. That 50 mile drive to Costco is fun on a nice day. 
@natty1988 - House prices in some places blows my mind. I built my house new in 2000. It’s 3200 square feet, 5 bedroom, 3 bath on 15 acres with a horse barn, fencing, 3 car garage… I might get 300K for it. Maybe a little more.
Agreed that the variation in housing prices can be extreme. We moved from a very low cost of living area to a very high one. Our old house was a very large 4 bed/4 1/2 bath with all kinds of bells and whistles. We sold it for what a 1 bedroom condo goes for in our new city.
There are all sorts of pros and cons to low cost of living areas and high cost of living areas.
Okay, then, most of you really hate the idea of a cost of living adjustment on the FAFSA. Got it. Me, I’ll still sit over here trying to come up with ways to help the middle class in high cost of living areas make a better life for themselves and their kids…without having to live in places with no potable drinking water. It makes me sad that anyone would wear that as a badge of honor in this country. No one in America should be living in a place without potable drinking water–certainly not a family with two working adults.
As far as the original OP question, the biggest cheers at a high school graduation are often for the kids who maybe weren’t going to graduate, not the valedictorian or other high achievers. Ah well, it is only high school. Hopefully there will be lots of cheering for the high achievers in the future.
In terms of guidance counselor help with financials, our high school guidance counselors spend a lot of time in May going over financial packages with families. Some parents aren’t experienced in figuring out which is the best deal for a student over all four years. These meetings are by request of the student or parent and financial disclosure is certainly not required. However, if it can help a student figure out their best financial option, I’m glad our GCs are experienced and willing to help.
@ccprofandmomof2 why would you assume I’m proud of that or wear it as a badge of honor. Neither of those assumptions are correct, but those things were what we had to accept to get by for varying lengths of time. My point was that there are people getting by in these high cost of living areas but living in a whole different world, so perhaps those in their admittedly overpriced houses aren’t as bad off as they think they are. I was simply offering perspective.
The idea of affordability/quality of life is something I try to impart to my young adult children. I think it is easy to get caught up in the rat race (for lack of a better term coming to mind right now) and live in very high cost areas where high salaries are eroded and quality of life is therefore impaired. There are actually areas of the country where the cost of living is relatively more affordable, the quality of life is good, and good jobs are available. I’ve always been perplexed about why some people live where they do - and by that, I mean the educated, comfortable people who do have choices. I realize many do not.
Right, there’s a lot of middle ground. I can get to Costco in about 15-20 minutes in decent traffic, There are de.cent job opportunties here and it’s a decent sized (metro area 500Kish) city with a symphony, good restaurants, a growing arts scene, big-time college sports, and a reasonable COL. Schools are a weak point here but the same is true of many hich COL areas. I think lots of similar cities exist in flyover country.
And even on the coasts as well.
@ccprofandmomof2 ,The plains states, Midwest and south are full of places that are both low cost and have great lifestyles, and a very good standard of living when adjusted for housing costs and local taxes. It’s all about what you keep, not what you earn.
Flint, MI is an anomaly in a state with the best (and most) water in the country, and despite what you might have heard, was horribly corrupt and mismanaged at the local level. Nearby cities replaced their lead pipes with no outside money before problems happened. Not Flint.
There are lots of tech companies and startups and research going on too outside of the Bay Area, DC and Austin. They just do different stuff, like make replacement joints and compute optimal fertilizer levels for farms and process food, or find natural resources and develop new pharmaceuticals.
People with middle class incomes should not need any help from the government. The middle class should be largely self sufficient. If Yale, for example, did have any cross subsidies tuition would be in the 30-35K range annually, well within the means (if a small stretch) for most middle class families who had saved for it. Most state colleges are affordable. Colleges should be working on reducing their costs, and the continual tuition increases are inexcusable given the advances in technology. Why are we using a 19th century model?
Sorry I misread your post @milgymfam. I see lots of my colleagues and students’ families, hardworking good people who are not squanderers of wealth, who do live in pretty bad conditions, and it makes me feel like there’s something broken about our society.
@doschicos I guess there are a few careers people believe are worth sacrificing for. Academe is one. It’s not easy to get a tenure-track job, and most have to take what they can get wherever it is. Believe me, we have counseled our kids not to make the same mistake we did! They have been told we absolutely do not support them becoming teachers. There’s also the pull of family. It’s not easy to relocate an entire extended family, and for many that is more important than other aspects of quality of life. Plus, there are usually some members of the family who are doing well and wouldn’t want to leave, so the rest hang on and eek out the best they can.
Look, I am not asking for a pity party. I have it really good. I know that. I think OP knows that too. But I don’t think that a conversation about, say, increasing the ceiling on the middle class scholarship at the UCs, is unreasonable. And I know some people always throw out median incomes and say I should be quiet because $120K is middle class because it’s above the median, but I don’t think that $120K functionally buys a middle class life in high cost of living areas. It just doesn’t. I would happily pay higher taxes so that a family doesn’t have to choose between living in squalid conditions and saving a major portion of their income their whole lives for those four years of education for their kids.
Maybe we should start another thread on what cities are actually currently pleasantly livable for the middle class. Hubby and I are fine in the Bay Area but not sure our kids are going to be able to afford to live here. Speaking of other places besides CA that have a large homeless problem, I was just in Salem and then Eugene, OR last weekend and both of those seemed to have a lot of street people relative to their total overall populations.
@washugrad Yes, I doubt my kids are coming back to the Bay Area, and wouldn’t encourage them to do so unless they wanted to work in tech. But quite a contrast in reasoning from when I was growing up and had to leave because my hometown was economically depressed with few decent jobs.
D18 is at college in Salt Lake City and that feels to me like a very liveable place if you like the outdoors.
“Yes, if we moved to a lower cost area we could live in a bigger house. But, we don’t care about a big house. We care about living in a nice area with low crime, etc.”
Uh, nice areas with low crime exist in (relatively, compared to the coasts) lower COL areas too . . .
MODERATOR’S NOTE: Since this thread has drifted off-topic, and the OP’s question has been answered, I am closing the thread. Please feel free to start a new thread on COL if you’d like.