More bang for your buck
Good news, everyone… you’re richer than you think!
Well, relatively speaking anyway. A recent report made its way to my email inbox showing the “real value” of a dollar in each of the 50 U.S. States. It turns out that a dollar is worth more here in Arkansas than anywhere else in the country.
What that means is, the cost of living, the purchasing power in the state and the comparative value of a dollar here in relation to, say New York, California or Florida, is higher in Arkansas. In fact, you get more for your dollar in Arkansas by almost 20 percent. And while that might not sound like a lot, in a world of $4-a-gallon gas and nearly $5-a-dozen eggs, every penny counts.
One dollar in Arkansas has the purchasing value of $1.19.
Again, that’s best in the nation. Mississippi was next highest at $1.17, with Alabama, South Dakota and West Virginia close behind at $1.16. Now, you might look at that list of five states and know that those include some of the poorest states in the U.S. That’s true, and for the poorest people in those states, telling them their dollar is actually worth $1.19 probably isn’t going to have them jumping for joy.
But for the middle-class and upper-class residents of Arkansas, that real-world value actually is significant. A $11-per-hour full-time job earns you $440 a week, and that translates into $523.60 in purchasing power. Carrying that out a little further, a $40,000 a year salary has an adjusted value of $47,600. That’s a significant amount of
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money. What it means is that the middle-class in Arkansas can enjoy a higher standard of living for far less money than someone in say, Texas or Pennsylvania.
Where you can really see this come into play is in making major purchases, like a home or a car, especially these days when the cost of either is way, way up. It’s also a boon when calculating your taxes, which are standardized across the country. Add in the new child tax credit for a couple of kids — that’s $500 for two children, and a family of four Arkansans has $4,046 in spending power compared to $3,332 for the same size family living in Chicago.
What does all this mean?
It means that while we do live in a relatively economically- depressed area, we can at least know that what money we are working with will go farther toward helping us make ends meet. Prices, the cost of services, the value of wages and spending ability all factor into making your money worth more.
It should also serve as an incentive to draw people to the state. omeone earning $100,000 a year in Colorado coming to Arkansas for the same salary would have $119,000 in comparative value. That goes a long way toward buying a house, paying for college or supporting a family.
They always told us in school that Arkansas was the best state because we were the only one that could support itself if isolated from the rest of the country. I don’t know if that’s necessarily true, but it is good to know that here in the Natural State we can make a dollar stretch just a little bit farther.
