The Porter family is moving from Baltimore, Maryland, to San Francisco, California. They would like to know what the difference will be in their family budget. How would you explain cost of living to them?

In a business perspective, we need to consider cost of living and rent index (considering they will rent in both cities) difference in response to net earnings. Per data in general, we can say that it would cost ~$5000+ to live in California and around $4000+ in Maryland. These values should be directly related to the indices difference of these underlying factors: consumer prices (CA is 4% lower than MD), consumer prices + rent (CA is 7% higher than MD), rent (CA is 28% higher than MD), restaurant (CA is 3% lower than MD), groceries (CA is 4% lower than MD), and local purchasing power is 10% higher in CA than MD.