A 20 percent down payment is the gold standard held up by every real estate resource ever. With less than 20 percent down, you’re on the line to pay PMI — private mortgage insurance — a fee that’s tacked on to your mortgage every month for no other reason than to protect the bank (not you) if you ever default on your loan.

Folks, I’m here with some revolutionary news. Eating well and exercising is the best way to get in shape, and the secret to paying off debt is having extra money. But as simple and, yes, obvious as those solutions are, they’re actually really tough to put into practice. So if you’re someone living with debt, and looking for a way to make “extra money” come easier, you may want to consider a move.

I have this argument with friends every now and again: What’s “American” food? The question inspires a lively discussion, with a lot of suggestions but no real consensus. (It usually comes down to hog dogs or Southern-style barbeque.) Nailing down American food is a tough thing because there is so much of America. So many people and cultures and styles that manage to blend together and evolve over the (few) centuries the country’s been around.

There is so much that’s confusing about the home buying process as a first-timer, and all I can really do (beyond writing articles like this one) is absolutely promise that an attentive real estate agent and a knowledgeable mortgage broker will be your lifelines. You’ll be surprised how much you learn about earnest payments, escrow and amortization in that month or so it takes to close. Definitely more than you paid attention to in college accounting, I’ll tell you that much.

There’s a lot about the roommate experience that can be tricky. Like chores, chores and, uh… chores. But even after you’ve mastered homekeeping, there are still some things about sharing a home that may come as a surprise. For example, your roommate’s renter’s insurance policy might not cover your stuff.

Much like finding out your new boyfriend is actually the heir to the throne of a small European country, living a life without rent is something that most of us will only dream about. But there are actual, real, human people living that life—who eat, sleep and work in the five boroughs without spending their hard-earned cash on their apartment. How do they do it? They’ve managed to co-opt the conventional “hard-earned cash” equation and cut out the middle man.

If you lustfully dream about getting out of the rental game—to have creative control over your space or just to stop “throwing away money” every month—you’ve no doubt given some thought to whether it’s cheaper to rent or to buy where you live. It’s easy enough to search out a couple of listings on Zillow to give yourself a quick answer, but the truth is there are lots of unexpected financial effects to weigh—on both sides.

If you’re reading this from New York City or Boston or San Francisco (or really anywhere!), I don’t have to tell you: the rent is too damn high. (It’s an old meme, but it checks out because it’s still too damn true.) Wages aren’t keeping up with the cost of living, and housing in metro areas is getting prohibitively expensive. “Prohibitively” expensive?

Two thousand square feet is massive in almost anyone’s book, so you can expect that apartments in this tier are going to fetch top dollar in any region. But “top dollar,” it turns out, is quite different depending on where you happen to be apartment hunting. Although SLC and NYC don’t seem all that different when you abbreviate them, living in a rental in the former would be about $6,000 cheaper than the latter.

Anyone who’s ever started on an apartment search knows the basic math of renting, delivered here à la Biggie Smalls: Mo’ money, mo’ square footage. If you have more dollars to spend, you can get yourself into a bigger apartment. Much bigger, in some places. From the deep South to deep in Manhattan, here is what it costs to rent five 1200-ish-square-foot apartments across the U.S.

There’s a bit of difference between what’s considered a small living space across the country. In Manhattan, 900 square feet can feel like a palace, while some Southern coastal cities would consider anything under 1,000 square feet to be on the small side. It shows, too, in what rent the same size apartment can fetch across the country.