Compare the Cost of Living across Cities Worldwide with Expatistan
Link: Expatistan.com
The world has moved to a global audience and geographical boundaries are not as hard to cross as they were once. This has brought a drive to relocate for some. With relocation, creep in the fear of moving to a new city and the uncertainty of expenses in the new city. Worry not.
There is a web-services that can do a comparison of prices across cities globally, and can ease your relocation worries considerably. The web-services I am talking about is Expatistan. Let us take an in-depth look at the features offered by Expatistan.
Comparing Cities
You can compare the prices as projected by Expatistan with the actual prices in your city. You must note that wherever Expatistan does a comparison and arrives at a comparison, the reference point is Prague.
I did a comparison for Tokyo and Paris. As you can see here, the comparison is divided into Food, Housing, Clothes, Transportation and others. The data used for these comparisons is fed by users, so you might want to check the number of users contributing to this.
Expatistan announces the number of people contributing to the comparison, the amount of data available for comparison and the last time when the data was updated.
The User Interface
You can also view additional details about the price comparisons you make. However, Expatistan makes the process simpler by showing details of a certain category only when you click on it. Otherwise, you are given a list of categories as you can see below.
Expatistan also gives an overall score as an aggregate of all the above statistics. This figure can be used to describe the cost comparison in a single figure.
The Amount of Data
The amount of data that Expatistan returns is not very detailed at first sight, but each category extends to show more data. For example, for a comparison between Tokyo and Paris, the transportation comparison gives individual prices. Moreover, the data on Expatistan is well-presented giving it an aesthetic appeal.
Verdict
From using Expatistan to estimate the increase in my expenditure, (I moved to a new city) I noticed that the data presented here was not perfectly accurate. However, it gives a fairly good estimate of how the prices might differ. If you find something that is wrong, you can also rectify the data or add to the data on Expatistan.
If you are moving to a new city, or even if you are not, this service is excellent to compare the cost of living across different countries. It can come in handy in travel plans or for other statistical work too.
