Can You Make Way More Somewhere Else?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is the U.S. Federal Agency responsible for measuring and reporting job market activity.  This includes unemployment, inflation data, and other key measures.  When you hear a CNBC host cite U.S. unemployment figures, those numbers are coming from the BLS. 

And if you haven’t been paying attention, things have been going well.

Your federal tax money funds what the BLS does, so you might as well take advantage of the resources they provide.  One of their best resources is the Occupational Employment Statistics map, or OES map.  The BLS OES map serves up valuable data about jobs and salaries in a simple mapping interface. 

For a financial independence seeker who’s looking to make a geographic move or to make more money, this resource is invaluable. 

To see data about a particular industry, just pick the proper category in the “Major Occupational Group” pull-down menu. 

 

Then find the more detailed job titles in the “Occupation” pull-down menu. 

 

 

Next is the “Measure” pull-down menu.  Here you have three main choices.

• Employment
• Location quotient
• Annual mean wage

And you can choose these three options either by state or by MSA.  What is MSA?  MSA stands for “Metropolitan Statistical Area”. 

Wikipedia does a great job of explaining it but basically they’re not counties, incorporated cities, or even Census blocks.  MSAs are areas with common economic ties.  For instance, Washington D.C. and Baltimore are close geographically and the cities themselves are of similar population, but since D.C. is an economic juggernaut compared to Baltimore, some of the Baltimore suburbs are actually grouped with D.C. for MSA purposes.

Your next question might be “Hey Dave, this stuff is dorky, what is a location quotient?” 

A Location Quotient is a measure of the prevalence of an occupation in an area relative to the U.S. average. 

So if a certain state or MSA has twice the number of doctors than the national average per capita, it would have a higher location quotient.

 

Example

Here’s an example.  To find data for teachers, I chose…

• “Education, training, and library” in the first pull-down. 
• “Teachers and instructors, all other, except substitute teachers” in the next pull-down (I know, they have a weird way of categorizing their data…). 
• “Annual mean wage by MSA” in the last pull-down. 

That combination will yield a map of mean teacher salaries by MSA in America.  It looks like this:

 

A nifty thing about the map is that no matter which measure category you pick, when you hover your mouse over a state or MSA it shows the values for all the other choices.  I hovered the mouse over the Memphis, TN MSA.  Apparently teachers do really well there as compared to the national average, having a mean salary close to $70,000 per year. 

And the cost of living is pretty low, just sayin….

 

As you can see above, the map also shows a breakdown of salaries by percentiles when you hover over an MSA.  In this case the picture above shows that 10% of teachers in the Memphis MSA make more than $105,860 annually.  

Additionally, the map calculates employment per 1000 people for any particular occupation. That measure can help you find areas with possible shortages in a certain profession. 

 

Geoarbitrage

Go ahead and kick the tires on the OES map.  If you plan on using geoarbitrage in your financial independence strategy, or if you just don’t like where you live anymore and want to make a move, the OES map is a tremendous tool. 

You can find areas that pay above the mean in your occupation, as well as areas that have shortages of workers in your profession relative to others. 

I’ve done lots of other geographic-based posts showing various aspects of money and finance from a location perspective.  Be sure to check out my Geoarbitrage Resources Page that has tons of great tools to help you find your perfect location.

I hope you find these resources handy and I will continue to expose valuable tools that can help when deciding on a geoarbitrage strategy.