I used to use a salary calculator from HomeFair.com when I wanted to compare cost of living between two cities. It was easy to use–you just entered a dollar amount and pick your origin and destination cities off of lists. Then it gave you the dollar amount you’d need to make in the destination city to be the equivalent of what you’re making in the origin city. But sometime this last year they merged with another system and redid things. One of those changes was doing away with this for some reason.

So now if you want to compare the cost of living between two different cities, I recommend the Cost of Living Calculator at http://www.bestplaces.net/col/. It works similarly, but the results are even better. They tell you what you would need to make to be the equivalent and also give you the percentage difference. But then there’s a great chart that compares the two cities’ Cost of Living Indexes for Food, Housing, Utilities, Transportation, Health, Miscellaneous, and Overall. The numbers are based on the U.S. average being 100. This lets you compare the costs of more specific aspects of life. Pretty cool!