Brokelyn

Don't pack up that car just yet

Did you know that rents in Brooklyn can vary as much as $600 depending on what time of year you move? That’s according to the latest monthly rental rundown from MNS, which is full of helpful info if you’re trying to figure out whether you can stand another six months of your roommates’ creepy cuddliness. The site also tracks price trends over the past year, so you can see that, par exemple, renting a Williamsburg studio in October is for suckers because July is when rents are lowest. It’s interesting that there’s no consistency through all the stats and each neighborhood has different seasons of savings: Fort Greene rents dip during the summer while Park Slope’s shoot way up, for instance. The stats are worth studying if you’re juggling apartment options and actually considering factors other than the nearest train.

Live cheaply in Cheyenne, where The Wrangler is their Barneys.

We love Brooklyn as much as the next web site and probably more, but who doesn’t have some kind of escaape fantasy of picking up and heading to, say, Cheyenne, Wyoming? And what does it take to afford a town like that?

CNN.com answers that question with a totally addictive calculator that lets you compare how much you’d have to earn in another American city to maintain your current lifestyle. If you now make $100,000 a year (shouldn’t you be on Richlyn.com instead?) you’d need to pull in only $83,394 a year in Cheyenne. (They don’t have a Fairway, FYI.) How about some other cities? Read the rest of this entry »