The Money Mustache Community

General Discussion => Welcome and General Discussion => Topic started by: DadJokes on November 14, 2019, 06:31:30 AM

Title: Income Percentile by City Calculator
Post by: DadJokes on November 14, 2019, 06:31:30 AM
https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-by-city-calculator/

With this calculator, you can put in your individual or household income and see how it compares to your local area. I find it very beneficial, since incomes vary so much just based on where people live. I'm curious what the results are in the forum.
Title: Re: Income Percentile by City Calculator
Post by: DadJokes on November 14, 2019, 06:34:42 AM
As for mine, I was surprised by how much the percentile jumped from my individual income to the household income. I guess a working spouse is a lot less common than I thought.

Individual: 63rd (Me) and 47th (DW)
Household: 88th

Edit: after reading further down in the notes, the median household income is lower than the median individual income in my locality. I'm not sure how that's possible.
Title: Re: Income Percentile by City Calculator
Post by: Dave1442397 on November 14, 2019, 06:40:56 AM
83 for me, 78 for my wife, 96 for household.
Title: Re: Income Percentile by City Calculator
Post by: rab-bit on November 14, 2019, 07:01:55 AM
95 for me, 72 for DW (working part-time, 4 days per week), 97 for household
Title: Re: Income Percentile by City Calculator
Post by: OtherJen on November 14, 2019, 07:06:48 AM
78th for household. We’re low-income relative to this forum, so I didn’t bother with individual incomes.

I’m actually shocked our household percentile is so high. I think our family/friend bubble (generally high income) distorts our impressions.
Title: Re: Income Percentile by City Calculator
Post by: Daisyedwards800 on November 14, 2019, 07:13:14 AM
97th for household and 88th for each of us individually.
Title: Re: Income Percentile by City Calculator
Post by: maizefolk on November 14, 2019, 07:24:30 AM
As for mine, I was surprised by how much the percentile jumped from my individual income to the household income. I guess a working spouse is a lot less common than I thought.

Individual: 63rd (Me) and 47th (DW)
Household: 88th

Edit: after reading further down in the notes, the median household income is lower than the median individual income in my locality. I'm not sure how that's possible.

I get identical percentile values for myself as an individual and myself as a household.

I also get a higher percentile rank in my metro area than I do entering the exact same income this old NYTimes calculator from 2012 https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/01/15/business/one-percent-map.html, and I know incomes in my metro area have grown, not shrunk, in that time period.

Not sure I have complete confidence in these results.
Title: Re: Income Percentile by City Calculator
Post by: RWD on November 14, 2019, 07:27:51 AM
There is only one city listed for Mississippi...


Not sure I have complete confidence in these results.
Yeah, I'm pretty skeptical myself. I thought I'd try a bunch of different cities to see how we stacked up and it kept spitting out exactly the same percentile: 90%. Only a couple choices actually changed the result.
Title: Re: Income Percentile by City Calculator
Post by: DadJokes on November 14, 2019, 08:01:17 AM
Yeah, the more I've played with it, the less confident I feel with it. It seems to put people in a much higher percentile than I would expect.

I tried another site: statisticalatlas.com and found the results a bit more realistic, albeit not as interactive.
Title: Re: Income Percentile by City Calculator
Post by: Knapptyme on November 14, 2019, 08:38:31 AM
Yeah, the more I've played with it, the less confident I feel with it. It seems to put people in a much higher percentile than I would expect.

I tried another site: statisticalatlas.com and found the results a bit more realistic, albeit not as interactive.

Similar results here. We're a single income family (aside from side hustles). Our individual percentile was 62 and our household percentile was 72. How's that possible? Are those individuals not living in a household?

The other site mentioned above seemed more accurate as we fit pretty close to 50th percentile in a more specific region to us, not just the nearest metro region.

An interesting note in my mind is the focus on income of which the FIRE community eventually eschews. I wonder what it would look like if there was a net worth per income data set. It may already exist, but I've only seen them separately so far.
Title: Re: Income Percentile by City Calculator
Post by: MyAlterEgoIsTaller on November 14, 2019, 09:25:00 AM
I got identical 85 for both individual and household.
I got 80 with the NYT link posted above.
All of these are surprisingly high.
Title: Re: Income Percentile by City Calculator
Post by: maizefolk on November 14, 2019, 09:30:17 AM
An interesting note in my mind is the focus on income of which the FIRE community eventually eschews. I wonder what it would look like if there was a net worth per income data set. It may already exist, but I've only seen them separately so far.

The problem with comparative net worth data is that is is confounded so heavily with age that you really need to control for both age AND income which requires much more granular data.

The typical 18-34 year old has a net worth of only $11,200, while the typical 34-45 year old has a net worth of ~$62,000 and it increases dramatically from there.* Those are median  (50th percentile) numbers. Averages are much substantially higher as there are more super rich people than people with negative millions of dollars.

*Irrelevant side note and statistical pet peeve of mine: the reported size racial wealth gap in the USA almost never controls for the effect of age on net worth and, since the median white american today is 44 and the median non-white american is 31, age has a big confounding effect on the size of the gap. The real number is plenty bad on its own, there's no reason to undermine it by trying to exaggerate the gap using bad statistical analysis.
Title: Re: Income Percentile by City Calculator
Post by: Xlar on November 14, 2019, 09:45:21 AM
https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-by-city-calculator/

With this calculator, you can put in your individual or household income and see how it compares to your local area. I find it very beneficial, since incomes vary so much just based on where people live. I'm curious what the results are in the forum.

Sadly I don't think this is accurate at all... The median income in the US is ~62k (https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/09/us-median-household-income-up-in-2018-from-2017.html (https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/09/us-median-household-income-up-in-2018-from-2017.html)

Even in San Fransisco this calculator says the 50th percentile (median) is just $60k. In NY city it is just $48k... I don't see how you can rectify the dqydj data with the census data.
Title: Re: Income Percentile by City Calculator
Post by: OurTown on November 14, 2019, 09:48:33 AM
94th individual, 97th household.
Title: Re: Income Percentile by City Calculator
Post by: mm1970 on November 14, 2019, 11:09:35 AM
90/90 because we are in a small city and they only do deciles.
Title: Re: Income Percentile by City Calculator
Post by: dougules on November 14, 2019, 11:25:00 AM
80s individual 90s household.  At first glance I'm kind of surprised that there's not more variation between cities. 
Title: Re: Income Percentile by City Calculator
Post by: honeybbq on November 14, 2019, 11:37:26 AM
96/97, 99

But yeah... median income in Seattle is 86k, across the lake in Bellevue is 105k. I'm surprised I've/we've gotten that high of ranking considering all the people who make a metric shit-ton of money in Seattle.
Title: Re: Income Percentile by City Calculator
Post by: obstinate on November 14, 2019, 11:47:14 AM
I'm surprised I've/we've gotten that high of ranking considering all the people who make a metric shit-ton of money in Seattle.
99 in NYC. Plenty of people making a metric shit ton here, too, but a lot more people making much less. For every millionaire here there are probably fifty people struggling to pay rent.
Title: Re: Income Percentile by City Calculator
Post by: LoanShark on November 14, 2019, 02:35:07 PM
99%
Title: Re: Income Percentile by City Calculator
Post by: honeybbq on November 14, 2019, 03:40:43 PM
I'm surprised I've/we've gotten that high of ranking considering all the people who make a metric shit-ton of money in Seattle.
99 in NYC. Plenty of people making a metric shit ton here, too, but a lot more people making much less. For every millionaire here there are probably fifty people struggling to pay rent.

Right, I imagine they live in the suburbs and stuff, so the value of the city ranking would still be high.
Or maybe not. Maybe it's a lot of apartment dwellers or multi-generations in one house kinda thing.

Ok, I'm 99% income, who are all these people at Pottery Barn??
Title: Re: Income Percentile by City Calculator
Post by: FireHiker on November 14, 2019, 05:45:51 PM
91% for myself, 94% for my husband, 96% combined. Honestly it's probably pretty accurate for our area. Now that we have downsized our home and upsized our savings, I see FIRE approaching faster than ever (but still not quickly enough today).
Title: Re: Income Percentile by City Calculator
Post by: maizefolk on November 14, 2019, 06:26:02 PM
If "individual" defined as only single person households and "household" as only multiperson households?

That's the only way I can come up with to explain how so many folks are getting lower percentile scores as individuals than as households when it should be the other way around if anything.