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You wouldn't be making that amount of money in Iowa because the position wouldn't be available in Iowa? What about Milwaukee? Could you make close to that there? Aren't accounting positions pretty standard across all cities? Also, you could but the same home in Iowa for probably %40 less salary.
The only place in the Midwest that you may potentially make more money in is Minneapolis. Metro Minneapolis has a higher median HHI, but Minneapolis is also less than 1/3 the size of Chicago, so take that FWIW.
The only place in the Midwest that you may potentially make more money in is Minneapolis. Metro Minneapolis has a higher median HHI, but Minneapolis is also less than 1/3 the size of Chicago, so take that FWIW.
I was asking if the same higher paying job titles or positions would or wouldn't be available in those smaller cities. I know pay for the SAME positions would be a little higher in Chicago.
What do you want from a suburb in any of these places? How urban do you want it to be? What's your ideal price range? How far away do you want to be from the city? What's a Chicago suburb you would like to use as a point of comparison? All of those would be helpful.
I will say though that depending on what you want, you may find some cheaper appearing metros to actually be not all that cheap. Metro St. Louis looks cheap on paper, but you'll find many of St. Louis' popular inner ring suburbs in St. Louis County can be fairly expensive. For example, if you wanted a fairly urban suburb like Evanston in a metro like St. Louis, then Clayton would be a good fit. Here's the catch though: Clayton's median home values are more than double what Evanston's are.
I was asking if the same higher paying job titles or positions would or wouldn't be available in those smaller cities. I know pay for the SAME positions would be a little higher in Chicago.
Really depends where you're looking for. Minneapolis has a decent Fortune 500 presence, so there will be jobs of varying levels and types just like there would in Chicago. The differences are the concentration of these types of jobs and their pay. There will be more in Chicago and they will, on average, pay more.
Really depends where you're looking for. Minneapolis has a decent Fortune 500 presence, so there will be jobs of varying levels and types just like there would in Chicago. The differences are the concentration of these types of jobs and their pay. There will be more in Chicago and they will, on average, pay more.
So if you get on with a Fortune 500 in Indianapolis would you have a standard of living in Indy or Chicago?
So, this is where the difference in quality of life from the suburbs comes in. In Chicago, traffic sucks. You have far better public transport...but either way, getting from a suburb into downtown is not quick and easy. Period. You WILL spend more time getting places in Chicago than you ever would in a moderately sized city. You can live in an outer ring suburb of St. Louis or Milwaukee and get downtown faster than you can get there from an Evanston or Oak Park. If you live in an inner ring suburb, there is no comparison with the ease and frequency in which you can enjoy the city ammenties in the moderately sized cities. Add kids to the mix one day and it will be even more noticeable. I can take something as simple as my kids hockey schedule and how spread out that can be and double the amount of time I would spend in the car (at least) if I was in Chicago.
Well there's a reason that 300,000 people use Metra every day - and during the weekday it has some very convenient express schedules.
I have plenty of people at work who can get from downtown to their stations in the inner ring suburbs in around 15-20 minutes. With express trains you can move quite quickly.
It certainly CAN be quick and easy. Much faster than driving. You can get from downtown Chicago to Evanston in about 20 minutes. You can get to Oak Park in around 15 minutes.
You can get from downtown Chicago to Naperville around 40 miles away in about a half hour if you catch the express trains that run at rush hour.
Not as fast if you're doing non-peak - but most people coming into the city are doing so for work - and Metra moves very fast during those times with hundreds of trains.
Depending on your job, you probably would have seen similar benefits from going from Milwaukee to Chicago (i.e. more professional opportunities, larger projects, not having to drive daily, being on your feet more often, improvements in dining, travel and finding like-minded people). I think it's a lot more about just going to a larger city than a different region.
No argument there. This is why I even described my predicament, I thought a lot of parallels with going to Chicago from a place like Milwaukee can be drawn.
What industry are you in? I also don't see how your standard of living is not worse except for climate. I also don't believe that dining could be better in san fran.
I'm in IT (SW Development). What my post was about is that it really all depends on what you internalize as the standard or quality of living. I have a feeling yours and mine are quite different.
Dining in San Francisco can be better than just about anywhere else. This has been argued and re-argued here, so I don't necessarily want to reopen that can of worms. In my opinion, though, NY is better overall in terms of the food scene, while SF and LA are about equal, maybe with a bit more variety and exotic ethnic options in LA. While the rest of the country, including Chicago, which I really enjoy when I visit, not quite on the same level. Milwaukee, to my surprise when I came back to visit after more than a decade, has a few interesting options, but it's nowhere near the level of SF or Chicago.
You wouldn't be making that amount of money in Iowa because the position wouldn't be available in Iowa? What about Milwaukee? Could you make close to that there? Aren't accounting positions pretty standard across all cities? Also, you could but the same home in Iowa for probably %40 less salary.
This. There are tons of different accounting positions and jobs. It's not just the same thing everywhere. In Iowa you could do bookkeeping or work for a smaller firm that audits and does taxes for more smaller and local companies. These aren't going to pay a ton, and there isn't going to be a huge variety.
In Chicago on the other hand you have the headquarters and functionality roles for tons of companies. Places that hire tens of thousands of people who work for huge companies that are dealing with things all over the globe.
There's a reason that over 30,000 residential units have been built around the downtown and north side areas of Chicago since the recession ended and that the downtown area has gained 100,000 new jobs since the recession ended. Downtown Chicago is now around 45,000 or 9% above its previous all-time peak employment set in the year 2000.
My company has 250 people in it, accountants start out of school around $65,000. I make $115,000 after 15 years of working, and there are countless places like this around the city. We deal in managing real estate investments for public pension funds. Nothing we do is centered around Chicago and our job doesn't have anything to do with Chicago or Illinois itself other than we're headquartered here specifically because it's Chicago and it has the dynamics and the labor pool where they can choose from thousands of CPA's and people with accounting degrees. The infrastructure, the airport, the things the city has to offer that make these hundred of companies put their headquarters here.
I could get a job in Milwaukee, but the caliber of jobs in Chicago is on another level - because it's Chicago. Because it's one of the places in the country that headquarters want to be based in for a variety of reasons. The New York's, Chicago's, San Francisco's, the DC's.
If I left here there are 20 other firms I could inquire with who would pay very elevated salaries. In Iowa or Milwaukee that just doesn't exist. It's not their fault, I love Iowa to death and I love Milwaukee - but they're not huge hubs for professionals.
Last edited by Chicago60614; 12-01-2016 at 09:23 AM..
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