Financial media discovered that ten states exist where your cost of living drops if you abandon your job, your friends, and your infrastructure. Pack your bags. The solution to inflation was geographic arbitrage all along.
The list includes states where your rent costs less because nobody else wants to live there either. This counts as financial advice now. Buy low on real estate in places with no employers. Sell high on your dignity when you explain to your family why you moved to a state ranked 50th in education to save $200 a month on groceries.
Here's what beating inflation looks like in practice. You trade your $2,000 apartment in a city with actual job prospects for a $900 house in a town where the primary employer just closed. You save $1,100 monthly. You lose your $75,000 salary because remote work ended and no local company will hire you. Net savings: negative $73,900 per year. Congratulations on your financial optimization.
The technical analysis supports this strategy completely. If you chart cost of living against median income, these ten states form a perfect correlation called "you get what you pay for." Retail traders will see the cheap housing prices and miss the part where wages dropped 40% to match. They always do.
Some guy named Derek already refinanced his condo in Denver and bought three rental properties in the second-cheapest state on this list. He calculated his cap rate at 12% before remembering that tenants need income to pay rent. Derek now owns three empty houses in a contracting market and sends me angry emails about why technical analysis failed him. I never responded to his first email. He's written seventeen.
The real move here was obvious. Short the moving companies who advertise on this article. Long the U-Haul dealers in these ten states who resell the same trucks back to people fleeing six months later.
Photo by Marek Studzinski on Unsplash
Leave a Comment