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The Dutchess County town/city was lumped in with the cities of Newburgh and Middletown across the river in Orange County.
As a trio, they came in at No. 7, marketwatch.com said.
(Westchester was No. 3, and New York City, No. 4)
Marketwatch.com is a subsidiary of Dow Jones & Company, which is owned by News Corp. It operates a financial information website with business news, stock market data, and analysis. It found that, in some places, parents need up to six figure paychecks just to get by.
This means they need to pull in from $50,000 to more than $100,000, marketwatch.com found, citing data from the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, D.C.
Poughkeepsie, Newburgh, and Middletown, the survey noted, aren’t known for “ultra-posh” living; it was high housing costs that landed them on the list, something that most places near New York City face.
A family of four living in Poughkeepsie/Newburgh/Middletown needs to be making $92,837 to pay its basic bills, much less put anything away for the future.
The same clan in Westchester, where the average yearly tax bill is $15,589, needs $99,592, marketwatch.com reported.
If the four were living in The Big Apple, they’d have to fork out $98,722. At least there, they folks and kiddies can take advantage of a break in transportation costs.
The top two places?: Washington, D.C., and Nassau and Suffolk counties on Long Island.
In the nation’s capital, that family would need $106,493. Part of that is due to the high cost of child care, estimated at $31,158 a year, the highest in the country, marketwatch.com reported.
In Nassau/Suffolk counties it's $103,606. The median rent paid is a whopping $19,356 a year; taxes, about $17,000, and other necessities, $13,881.
The study examined 618 metropolitan areas and made its calculations based on the cost of food, housing, health and child care, transportation, taxes, and other bare necessities such as school supplies.
In 500 of the areas surveyed, according to the EPI data, child care took the biggest bite out of the family budget. It averaged $12,500 a year.
After New York City, the other places that made it into the Top 10 were, in descending, but not consecutive, order: Stamford/Norwalk, Conn.; Honolulu, Ithaca, San Francisco, and Danbury, Conn.
To read marketwatch.com’s entire report, click here.
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