I once worked for a company that was headquartered in Nashville, and most of their sales offices were in the South. My NJ office was one of only two in the Northeast. I used to talk to the other sales reps, and they were all driving Mercedes and even had car phones (this was the late 1980's when NOBODY had a car phone). I used to look at their sales figures and couldn't figure out how they did it, considering they all were making about the same as I was. Then I realized that the house we had just paid $225,000 only cost about $65,000 where they lived.