I can easily find things like rent, internet, insurance prices, but how do I find things like grocery prices? I honestly don’t even know what an average grocery list might look like, are there resources to help with this? my gf and I are looking into moving out, and assuming a monthly income of ~4400 USD and rent being 500 USD, I think we should be okay, but I need to be 100% that we won’t be barely scraping by or anything. thank you everyone
Rent is a pretty good measurement for cost of living for an area, and if you’re only paying $500 a month while making $50k a year I don’t think you have anything to worry about. Most people spend around a third of their pretax income on rent/mortgage and 10-15% on food. Transportation is going to vary a lot on your needs and what you have, but 20% would be on the high end. If you want to be sure, you could start tracking expenses and start an emergency fund to cover unexpected issues when things are most volatile. Most other things like entertainment can be pretty flexible.