Struggling to Get By: The Real Cost Measure in California 2015
Struggling to Get By: The Real Cost Measure in California 2015 is a new financial stability report that measures the real cost of living in California’s communities.
Struggling to Get By introduces the Real Cost Measure, a basic needs budget approach to better understand the challenges facing California households. A basic needs budget approach is intuitive and easy for most people to understand, as it is composed of things all families must address such as food, housing, transportation, childcare, out of pocket health expenses, and taxes. A basic needs budget approach takes into account different costs of living in different communities, and also conveys a better sense of the hardship for families with income below the basic needs budget level as it invokes the notion of tradeoffs between competing needs—if you have an inadequate level of income, do you sacrifice on food, gas, or childcare?
View the full report here.
Click here to access interactive maps at the county and neighborhood levels
Click here to view an interactive dashboard on Real Cost Budgets
Click here to download the public data set