This is the salary a person in NJ needs to be comfortable

Not surprisingly, the salary a single person in New Jersey needs to live comfortably is in six figures.

A little less than half of adult Americans are single (divorced, widowed, or never been married), and there are ways that being single is more expensive than being married.

Housing is the obvious one; a single person has to shoulder the entire expense of a mortgage or rent. Also, there are tax advantages to being married, and health insurance can be more expensive per person for a single.

CNBC calculated the salary needed for a single person to live comfortably, based on the 50/30/20 budget. That allocates 50% of income to necessities, 30% to discretionary spending, and 20% to savings.

They based the cost of necessities using data from the MIT Living Wage Calculator.

Believe it or not, New Jersey isn’t one of the five most expensive states, but we’re close.

Massachusetts is the most costly for a single person to live comfortably at $116,022. Then comes Hawaii at $113,693, followed by California at $113,651. New York is fourth; it takes $111,738 to live comfortably there if you’re single, followed by Washington at $106,496.

According to CNBC, a single person in New Jersey needs to earn $103,002 to be comfortable.

The cost of living overall in New Jersey is 1.18 times the national average, while the cost of housing is a whopping 30% higher than the national average.

Opinions expressed in the post above are those of New Jersey 101.5 talk show host Bill Doyle only.

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