Is your spending actually reasonable? Today, we're diving into data that compares spending in

high cost of living and low cost of living areas, and we'll answer one of the biggest questions

on the path of financial independence. Should you spend more because you live in a high cost

of living area, or are you just making excuses? Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money. excuses.

Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast.

My name is Mindy Jensen, and with me as always is my high-callity co-host, Scott Trench.

Thanks, Minnie.

It's great to be here.

I'm looking forward to spending a great hour with you here talking about budget benchmarking and spending.

A few months ago, we had a financial independence in New York City series where people are achieving FI or have achieved FI in a very high-cost living area in downtown Manhattan, so we know it can be

done.

Today, however, we're going to be using data to ground the discussion about how average people or median people in given geographies actually spend and how that should ground the assumptions we have around financial independence.

Scott, what tool are we going to use to look at this?

Oh boy, we're going to use another BP money tool. These are all free, of course. You can check them out at biggerpocketsmoney.com slash resources.

This one in specific URL, findable from the resource library is biggerpocketsmoney.com slash resources. This one in specific URL, findable from the resource library, is biggerpocketsmoney.com slash budget. This is a beast of a dataset. I think it's a beast of a dataset that I've assembled with my AI companion and painstakingly checked, although there's going to be, of course, deviations. There's a lot of estimates and guess work in here in the first place.

But this basically takes people based on their household type and composition, what income quintile they're in,

top, you know, 20%, bottom 20%, middle 20%, that kind of stuff. And then their location, and it takes government spending data,

actual government spending data, and modifies it for geography.

This is not aspirational. I think a lot of buyer and financial independence content talks about aspirational, like what spending ought to be in a given situation. This is not trying to do that.

This is just saying, here's what I believe spending actually is per Bureau of Labor

Statistics data, per HUD fair market rents in a given area, per regional pricing adjustments,

right? It's more expensive in Santa Cruz, California than it is in, you know, certain towns in

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