Skip to content

WorkWingman — Lifestyle Costs (Plain Language)

A salary number by itself doesn't tell you much. $120k in one city might stretch further than $140k in another, once you account for rent and the drive to the office. This feature lets you tell WorkWingman a few things about your current life — how big your place is, how far you drive to work, how efficient your car is — and it projects what those same things would cost near a job you're considering.

Everything here is completely optional and stays on your computer. Skip any question you don't know the answer to yet; nothing is required to keep using the rest of the app.

What you tell it (once, in "Home & commute")

  • What kind of place you live in (apartment, house, or other) and how many bedrooms.
  • What you currently pay per month for housing.
  • How far you drive to work, one way, and how many days a week you actually drive in.
  • How many miles per gallon your car gets.

That's it. None of this is your address, your name, or anything identifying — just size and distance numbers, and they never leave your machine.

What it shows you: two comparisons

1. "What would my home cost there?"

If you currently rent a 2-bedroom for $1,800/month, and you're looking at a job in a different city, WorkWingman looks up what a 2-bedroom typically rents for in that city and shows you the difference — "+$350/mo" or "-$200/mo," so you can see at a glance whether the new city is more or less expensive for the same amount of space.

Where that rent number comes from — real, official sources, nothing scraped:

  1. HUD Fair Market Rents. The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development publishes official rent figures for every metro area in the country, broken down by exactly how many bedrooms — which is exactly what's needed here. This is the main source.
  2. Census Bureau data. If HUD doesn't have a figure for a particular area, WorkWingman falls back to the Census Bureau's American Community Survey, which publishes a median rent for the metro as a whole (not broken down by bedroom count, so it's a rougher estimate, used only as a backup).
  3. Zillow. We looked into using Zillow's well-known rent index too. Zillow does publish this data for free — but only under terms meant for research and analysis, not for another app to re-serve through its own backend without a separate agreement. Rather than guess at whether that's allowed, WorkWingman doesn't pull from Zillow today. If Zillow's terms change or a licensing agreement is reached, this is a one-line swap to turn on.

If none of these has an answer for a particular city, WorkWingman says so honestly instead of guessing.

2. "What would my commute cost there?"

This one's pure math, no lookup needed beyond a gas price: distance to work, times two (there and back), times how many days a week you drive, times how many weeks in a month, divided by your car's MPG, times the price of gas. WorkWingman shows your current monthly gas cost side-by-side with what it would be for the new job, plus the difference.

If the new job is remote, the commute cost is simply $0 — no math needed, no guessing. If it's hybrid, WorkWingman assumes you'd drive in the same number of days as you do now and notes that your actual in-office days might end up being fewer. If the job's work arrangement isn't known yet, it still shows an estimate but flags that it might not apply.

Gas prices themselves come from a separate part of the app (being built alongside this one) that tracks real gas prices by city; until that's wired in, a reasonable flat average price is used so the math still works end-to-end.

The honest caveats

  • If you haven't filled in a field (like your current commute distance), WorkWingman just shows "—" for anything that depends on it, instead of a made-up number.
  • The rent comparison is only as good as its source data — HUD's figures are official but metro-wide, not neighborhood-specific, and Census's fallback figure isn't broken down by bedroom count at all.
  • None of this factors in things like state or local taxes on income, which is a different piece of the app being built separately.