Separate and unequal

The bills come piling in, just as they always do. California or Idaho. It doesn’t matter. There’s the mortgage, utilities, insurance, taxes. Assorted medical bills. We still buy groceries, gasoline, and go out to dinner. I shop at local stores and big chains.

The impact on the bank account looks the same, but different.

The expectation of California is that it’s so obviously expensive. You don’t just pick up and move here without factoring this in. But this is a big state. California has the size, population and budget of a small country. It has deserts and mountains. Traffic-choked cities and wilderness areas. When it’s freezing in Lake Tahoe, it’s 70 degrees in Santa Barbara. Rolling it all up into one ball doesn’t make sense. While some areas are playgrounds for the rich, other areas are pretty darn affordable.

That means it’s a mixed bag when it comes to expenses. Certainly the recent dive in housing prices here made it much more attractive for us to relocate. Even with prices recovering here just a bit, we still paid less for our California house than we did for our Idaho house eight years ago.

The mild weather here has mostly meant mild utility bills, surprisingly even during that July heat wave when I cranked up the air conditioning. However, when I kept our house nice and toasty – night and day – for the month of November, the bill I just received was a jaw-dropper. Yes, California charges more for utilities. We immediately adjusted the thermostat and put on an extra sweater. We’ll make up for it in March, April and May when springtime sunshine means I can click off the thermostat for most of the time. Lesson: if I pay attention, I can keep these costs in line.

 

Other costs are a mixed bag. Gasoline, lower. Insurance and taxes, about the same. Medical costs – lower, because our new provider here pays more of our share. Groceries, higher. Dining out can be more expensive since there are more expensive options here. But my favorite places tend to be pretty moderately priced.

The bottom line is we haven’t found California to be unaffordable. It’s different. We live differently and so spend our money differently too. We think quite a bit about expenses now as we keep comparing this place to the old place. As we slowly become Californians again, costs seem to be balancing out.