Real estate buyers often look at the cost of housing in other cities or states to get an idea of just how far their salary will go in their new home. However there is more to your annual cost of living than your mortgage payments. Whether you are looking for Atlanta real estate to buy, Atlanta homes for rent, or Atlanta apartments for rent, it is important to have a thorough understanding of the cost of living in your new home.

Here are a few of the more popular cost of living calculators you can find on the web. To compare the calculators we will use an example of a person making $50,000 per year moving from Phoenix to Atlanta.

CNNMoney – Gives the adjusted salary in the new location plus the percent change in your groceries, housing, utilities, and transportation. CNN Money lists statistics for 11 cities in Georgia but offers no information on what is included in each category. Does housing include just Atlanta real estate for sale, or does it also include Atlanta homes for rent?

• Adjusted salary $47,895
• Groceries -1.586%
• Housing -10.071%
• Utilities -4.805%
• Transportation +2.505%
• Healthcare +3.595%

Sperling’s Best Places – Compares living expenses in both home and new city compared to the national average but doesn’t directly compare them to each other. Categories are food, housing, utilities, transportation, health, and miscellaneous. It also gives an overall comparison, weighing each of the categories accordingly. For example, you will spend more on housing than transportation so housing is weighted higher.

• Adjusted salary $42,593
• Phoenix overall 107.8
• Phoenix real estate 116.7
• Phoenix miscellaneous 96.1

• Atlanta overall 92.4
• Atlanta real estate 79.9
• Atlanta miscellaneous 98.9

Bankrate.com – Gives very detailed statistics in 58 categories from the cost of Atlanta real estate to the price of bananas. Bankrate.com shows the difference in dollars but not in percentages. Differences are color coded (higher vs. lower) but it is difficult to see the difference between colors. The city list is one big listing not categorized by state so it is hard to tell how many Georgia cities are listed.

• Adjusted salary $48,525
• Atlanta real estate -$29,551.00
• Atlanta apartments for rent +$53.00
• Doctor visit +$6.11
• Newspaper -$8.00
• Bananas -$0.01

Salary.com – Asks for both the city you live in and the city you work in allowing it to make separate calculations of your average salary change vs. your change in living expenses. Salary.com lists 6 Georgia cities but offers no information on what makes up the cost of living calculations.

• Adjusted salary $50,510 (+1.0%)
• Adjusted cost of living $54,581 (+9.2%)
• No information on Phoenix vs. Atlanta real estate prices

The widely varying results in salary and cost of living make these calculators only marginally useful when figuring out how your cost of living will change. At the two extremes, the Bankrate calculator provides far too much detail to get a clear picture while Salary.com provides far too little. All of them look at numbers over the entire metropolitan area, while expenses will change depending on where you live in Atlanta. Real estate prices in particular can’t accurately be compared metro-to-metro in this manner.