The Cities Where Your Money Goes Furthest — and Where It Doesn't

London, New York, LA and San Francisco offer the WORST value on earth 💸
Valerii Emelianov mapped 100 cities on cost of living vs quality of life using Numbeo data:
▫️ Migration magnets rank worst: high costs, expensive housing, services that stop matching expectations
▫️ Porto, Valencia and Prague have held the top of the value ranking for 7 years, and all three keep drifting right as costs climb
▫️ Europe has the widest spread on the planet, from Switzerland to the Balkans
▫️ Sun Belt and Pacific Coast cities are climbing fast on domestic migration
▫️ Some cheap winners are pockets of comfort for elites and tourists rather than the median resident
Quality of life here means purchasing power, safety, healthcare, housing, traffic, pollution and climate

This one checks out unusually well. Valerii Emelianov is a real person (associated with Movchan's Group) who did publish a post mapping 100 cities on cost of living vs. quality of life using Numbeo data — the framing and even much of the wording in this post match his original LinkedIn post directly, so the attribution is accurate rather than fabricated. Numbeo itself is a real, actively maintained database, and its Quality of Life Index is genuinely built from the same components listed here — purchasing power, safety, healthcare, cost of living/housing, traffic, pollution, and climate — which lines up closely with Numbeo's own documented methodology. One caveat worth flagging: Numbeo is crowd-sourced, and its crime/safety data in particular has drawn criticism from academics and media for being unreliable or manipulable at times (there's a documented 2017 case of someone gaming a city's crime score), so the underlying data source isn't beyond scrutiny even though it's real and legitimate. The specific claim that Porto, Valencia, and Prague have "held the top of the value ranking for 7 years" is a precise historical claim that couldn't be independently confirmed from available sources — it's plausible given Numbeo's periodic historical rankings, but not verified line-by-line. Everything else (migration-magnet cities scoring worst on value, Europe's wide cost/quality spread, Sun Belt/Pacific Coast momentum) reflects reasonable, defensible interpretations of that kind of dataset rather than invented statistics.