These Are The 10 Cheapest Places To Live In Montana For 2019

How We Determined The Most Affordable Places To Live In The Treasure State For 2019

The two most important things to think about when it comes to being able to afford if you can live comes down to:

1. How much do money do I make?
2. How much do I have spend to live there?

You need to understand your costs in the context of how much money you make.

For example, if the median household earns $100,000 and spends $40,000 on housing it’s actually cheaper to live there than a place with a median income of $50,000 and housing costs of $21,000. You might spend more on housing, but you have more money overall to play with.

With that example in mind, we derived several statistics from the latest Census American Community Survey 2013-2017 around incomes and costs. They are:

• Median Home Price / Median Income (lower is better)
• Median Income / Median Rent (Higher is better)
• Median Home Price

We added simply median home price because high home prices generally correlate with higher expenses for all costs related to homes (heating, electricity, etc).

You can then compare these metrics in each of the places in Montana to figure out which is the least expensive.

What you are left with is a “Cost of Living Index” by taking the average rank of each of these metrics for each city.

So we used that cost of living index in order to rank all of the 50 places in Montana that have more than 1,000 people.

The place with the lowest cost of living in Montana according to the data is Chinook.

The 10 Cheapest Places To Live In Montana For 2019

The median income in Chinook comes in at $38,824 and the median home value is $102,900 for 2019.

The median income in Scobey comes in at $53,594 and the median home value is $119,200 for 2019.

The median income in Wolf Point comes in at $43,512 and the median home value is $107,100 for 2019.

The median income in Colstrip comes in at $88,542 and the median home value is $137,500 for 2019.

The median income in Glasgow comes in at $61,484 and the median home value is $140,800 for 2019.

The median income in Townsend comes in at $49,012 and the median home value is $141,200 for 2019.

The median income in Deer Lodge comes in at $37,985 and the median home value is $113,000 for 2019.

The median income in Baker comes in at $51,573 and the median home value is $144,800 for 2019.

The median income in Conrad comes in at $43,372 and the median home value is $118,000 for 2019.

The median income in Hardin comes in at $43,641 and the median home value is $111,800 for 2019.