NY feels the love – of your money
New government numbers prove what most New Yorkers know: It is a good deal more expensive to live here than anywhere else in the country.
New Yorkers pay more for housing and taxes than the average person in the rest of the country, though there are some bargains here.
Households in the New York region, which includes northern New Jersey, spent $63,752 per year, while the national average was $56,748, according to the latest numbers from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), which studied the years 2015 and 2016.
The BLS found the average resident of the New York metro region pays about 60 percent of his or her income for housing, transportation and food.
The primary reason for the pricey New York lifestyles was putting a roof over your head.
For example, New Yorkers typically spend 39 percent of their income on housing, while the rest of the nation averages 33 percent.
The rest of the country is also more likely to own their homes than the average person in the New York region (62 percent to 51 percent), BLS said.
And the BLS said that the average person in the New York region is faced with a bigger personal-tax bill compared to the rest of the country ($11,685 compared with $10,489).
BLS also found an odd quirk in the numbers, which applied to the entire Northeast region.
“The Northeast did not have the highest estimated market value of owned homes, but they paid more in property taxes,” according to Bruce Bergman, an economist with the BLS.
Overall, he conceded, those “expenditures are more in New York.”
Still, Bergman added that are some bargains.
Those largely are attributable to food costs, because New Yorkers on average spent less than the rest of the country on groceries, according to the BLS.
And the share of expenditures for aggregate transportation, which accounted for 11 percent of the average household’s budget in the New York area, was significantly lower than the national average of 16 percent. Those costs include gasoline and vehicle purchase costs.