Money magazine has a list of the 100 best places to live in the United States.  Four towns in North Carolina made the list and one of them is Clemmons at #100.

My town, Lewisville, abuts Clemmons and my kids play little league baseball mostly with kids from Clemmons, so I guess you could say that Clemmons is kinda/sorta my backyard.

Only one of the many towns in Northern Virginia (DC suburbs) made the list: Vienna, VA came in at #4 on the list.

Check out this comparison between Clemmons and Vienna:

Average Home Price:
Clemmons: $160,890
Vienna: $510,987

Median Household Income:
Clemmons: $64,115
Vienna: $111,877

So if you look at the home price as the multiple of the average household income in Clemmons the average home price is 2.5 times the median annnual household income.  In Vienna the multiple is 4.6.

Here’s another way to look at it: If you bought the house in Vienna with a 20% downpayment, 30 year fixed mortgage at 6% your monthly mortgage payment would be $2,451.  Using the same variables your payment in Clemmons would be $772.

I thought about trying to calculate the average net income of each household with x number of exemptions, but i’m not that smart so I’m going to use the gross income on a monthly basis. This also works because if both households are "married filing jointly" their federal tax rate is the same.  For VIenna the median gross househlold income is $9,323 per month and for Clemmons it’s $5,343.

So your mortgage payment in Vienna is a little more than 26% of your gross, and in Clemmons it’s a little under 14.5%.

I was already happy about the move, but now…