[mbrameld]

I think you underestimate the cost of living in Alaska. I live in Juneau and it is very expensive. Maybe not NYC or SF expensive, but in 2012 the median value of a single family home was $332,000. Food and gas are also very expensive. Things might be slightly cheaper in Anchorage or Fairbanks. You might be able to find some cheap land somewhere undesirable and build a house or a cabin, but it's going to be very expensive to get building materials shipped there.

[hudibras]

Median household income in Alaska is $61,000/year, so there are definitely lots of Alaskans who can scrimp by on $72k.

https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/statemedian/

[monknomo]

$72k/year is above average in Alaska; it is above average in every state. If you look at the census data you cite, you can see that Alaska is #7 in terms of median household in the US. I doubt that means that Alaskans are significantly richer than average Americans, it probably means that Alaska is more expensive.

It looks like melling is using Alaska as an example of a cheap place; somewhere your dollar goes farther. If you look at the "Real Value of $100" maps you see floating around[0] you'll see it is not a particularly cheap state. It might be cheaper than New York City, but I'm not at all sure it's cheaper than New York State. In fact, New York looks like it has a median income of 53k, so plenty of New Yorkers scrimp by on $72k. Based purely on maximizing the difference between their income and their neighbors, the hypothetical indie dev should go to Mississippi.

I think looking at the cost of living in a state is a better guide than median income. This cost of living chart[2] says that the cheapest states are Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Indiana, whereas the most expensive states are Hawaii, DC, New York, Alaska (ha!), and New Jersey. Based purely on minimizing their cost of living, the hypothetical indie dev should still go to Mississippi.

I am a little surprised to see that the median income of New York is so low compared to its cost of living, so a New Yorker, on average, might be better off moving to Alaska, but not by as much as some other state, I'd wager.

My surprise got me thinking, so I did a tiny bit of excel analysis, where I normalized median wages[0] based on the value of a dollar data[1], then sorted states based on normalized median wage / cost of living[2]. Utah, Nebraska, Virginia, Iowa, and Wyoming are the top 5 with that ratio, while Hawaii, New York, DC, California and Oregon (Oregon pips Alaska here, by one rank, but my point stands, Alaska is many things, but cheap isn't one of them) are the bottom 5. I think that maps roughly with my intuition that big coastal places are sort of expensive for their average salaries and that boring, but not poor places are cheap for their salaries. I'm not sure this is relevant to the indie dev who doesn't have an employer, but for those of us who work in the flesh, I guess we should go to Utah?

[0] https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/statemedian/ [1] http://taxfoundation.org/blog/real-value-100-each-state [2] http://www.missourieconomy.org/indicators/cost_of_living/ind...