What's the Cost of Living in El Paso Texas [2022]

What's the Cost of Living in El Paso Texas [2022]

Hi, and welcome to living in El Paso, Texas. My name is John Peña and in this episode We're going to talk about the cost of living in El Paso, Texas Hi, thank you so much for checking out the YouTube channel My name is John Peña your favorite real estate agent in El Paso, Texas if you are considering a move selling your home

Please consider reaching out to us if you're looking for information about El Paso by all means Please consider subscribing to the channel and in this episode. We're going to talk about the cost of living in 2022 in El Paso, Texas now I did a cost of living video is one of the first videos I ever did and that video dropped in August of

2020 so about a year and a half ago, so a lot has changed in a year and a half and Some things haven't but some things have and so I wanted to give this a little bit of a refresh and stay current because You know the economy changes a lot in a short amount of time not only do we have kind of rising inflation Concerns over rising interest rates, but you know a lot can happen in a year and a half

And so let's go ahead and jump into the the topic so The way that we're going to talk about cost of living is Conveniently there is what's called a cost of living index, and it's based off a national average of 100 and so Let's say that we have a city in America, and let's call it average USA in this city of made-believe

average USA It's it's the culmination of the national averages in one city So it gets a score of 100 for every single category the categories are an overall cost of living food groceries

Housing utilities transportation health you know all of these things that matter now any number below 100 means that in that? Particular city it is more affordable or less expensive for whatever category So let's say an average USA you go to the grocery store, and you spend $100 Okay, so in El Paso our food and grocery score is 92 so those same

$100 worth of groceries in average USA would only cost you $92 so you'd say reports found that There were a number of high schools that made the best high schools national list There are a lot of schools in El Paso, and you're gonna see that I'm gonna lay that out for you So you can understand that, but there were three high schools in El Paso independent school district five high schools in Socorro

independent school district six in Isleta two in Clint and three charter schools that made that rather fancy-dancy list of the best high schools, so I Mentioned some words you may not have heard yet El Paso We still haven't broken in that 1 million category of citizens

But we are a pretty big pretty sizable community And so the school district is actually not just the El Paso school district There are actually a couple of other school districts, and I'm going to show that information to you right here Okay, so the Isleta

Independent school district as you can see here covers a lot of East El Paso so if you've been watching these videos you know that there's the west side and then there's kind of the central Downtown area and then there's the east side and the east side is our larger side of the city it goes north

Up to the northeast where Fort Bliss is around there the airport and then on the east side And then we expand eastward into what we call the far east and if you caught last week's video on Horizon City That's over in the east and it's late to independent school district. It's still the public school district Public school district just like El Paso is but it covers mostly this area kind of in the east and so as you can see

There's a number of high schools middle schools K to 8 elementary schools and all of that very nice We actually when we first moved here. This is a school district that we lived in Bel Air high school was over there They did a beautiful renovation of a sports field house. I believe it was so very nice Okay, and then when you continue to what's more of like the far east

This is what's called Socorro independent school district. Socorro is actually a little town there you can see it in the red and the blue and it also

Independent school district public school district just like El Paso and Isleta and it covers basically this more far east side Now there's a couple others I'm not going to get into those but Clint you can see the city directly below there They have their own independent school district, but I didn't include those just because those are a little bit smaller

So for most of you when you move to El Paso You're going to either be in the El Paso independent school district The Isleta if you live on the east side or Socorro if you live on the far east Okay, so starting our tour here of the El Paso independent school district as you can see

54,000 students total 8,000 employees total and 84 schools now mind you this does not even include Isleta and Socorro I'm just going to give you kind of the the real details of El Paso independent school district because that's kind of the the main school district here

But remember there are those other two very large school districts So in El Paso number of schools ten traditional high schools two specialty high schools Four alternative high schools one career and technical school In addition to those we've got the 15 middle schools 1k to 8 school 1 6 to 12 and

50 elementary schools So El Paso is identified three main focus areas as you can see they are providing engaging challenging learning building strong supports Modernizing environments, which I love. I love this little video of somebody learning how to code very forward-thinking. Love that

and Then finally, they're really on the ball as is Isleta and Socorro, but they've developed a comprehensive strategic plan for 2020 I'm going to put the link to that below in case you really are interested and you want to get some more detailed information They've laid out pretty brilliantly how they plan to address the needs of a growing community here in El Paso

So next up just still with El Paso One website that kind of ranks schools is called great schools And as you can see they rank schools on a scale of ten one to ten one being poor ten being good As you can see El Paso has a pretty high

Pretty high numbers there. So that's fantastic news for those of you that are moving to our area the great schools website the They have a couple we have a couple of schools that are rated a ten out of ten We've got Silva Health Magnet High School, which was awarded a college success award in

2019 a lot of these schools by the way are early college or really focus on the college bound students But some of our other schools in El Paso and the El Paso Independent School District tens out of tens We've got Green Elementary School, Polk Elementary, Tippin Elementary, Trans Mountain Early College High School Loma Verde, which is an elementary and Mission Early College High School. So great schools

They do their rankings based off of these criteria They're looking for above average year-over-year academic improvement by the students that attend They're looking for above average college readiness measures above average how well it's serving disadvantaged students and finally kind of above average state test scores

so I would suppose that the school districts here are feeling pretty darn good because their rankings their scores by these types of websites are consistently very high and I was just actually responding to an individual who was talking about

El Paso and the property taxes are just too high. This is no this is nothing new to me I have heard this from a number of people Generally the number now that I'm telling people is 2.8 2.9 percent So of the property's value is what you're going to pay in property taxes

But the point that I always make is that El Paso is a community of small Growing young families and as you can imagine What's most important to young families are their children and what's most important to El Pasoans? I think kind of culturally is this idea of

getting an education and Kind of climbing that that ladder we all want our children to be more successful to have more than we had right and The way that you do that is through education and education is not free and of course, yes

the federal government and the state they provide funds for education, but trust me I was a teacher for over 15 years Education isn't cheap. What is these days? What is this? That's good these days, especially Education is not cheap. So those property taxes those are paying for these 10 out of 10

Rated schools, right all of those new buildings that you saw that were being constructed. That's property taxes, right? Extracurriculars are huge here. If you know anything about Texas, Texas loves football, right? so like the Friday Night Lights kind of football game high school football game that's straight out of the Texas playbook and Extracurriculars are huge. Not only just sports but music arts

now things like robotics and all of the STEM Education, so all of this stuff requires money and that a lot of that money comes from property taxes So don't mean to rant on property taxes

but chances are if you're watching this video because you have children you're probably not so concerned about property taxes because Essentially that money is an investment in the future It's an investment in your children and I mean I can't think of anything that would be more worth Investing in so there's my 10 cents on property taxes

Okay, so we also have what are called idea public schools I did a little bit of research on these and I wanted to include them just so that you know What your options are these are tuition free public charter schools? They're in their third year of being here these schools that they wear uniforms they offer extracurriculars just like the other schools

There's only a limited number of students that they accept. And so after they fill up they do a random lottery. So Just so that you're aware of those there are currently I believe four of those idea public charter schools in El Paso and also, additionally, we also have a

Pretty substantial number of private schools. These schools do Have tuition. I'm in a ballpark 5,000 to 10,000 dollars a year or some of the numbers that I saw and by niche.com We have some of the highest ranked at least in our area and some of the highest ranked ones were there as you can see

Radford Loretto Academy, which is a Catholic one Emanuel Christian, I believe is a k-12 Christian and so Radford there was non-denominational So if you're looking to do more of the private school thing We have plenty of options and I really mean that I looked at the numbers in a lot of times in cities where I've been

They have private schools, but you know They're it feels like they're just kind of hanging on with 50 to 100 students Most of the ones that I saw in El Paso, they were 400 up to 5 to 600 students So these are pretty sizable schools in addition to the already pretty sizable

Public schools and their student enrollments Okay, so I hope that helps to give you kind of an idea of what the school what the education system is like here I didn't even talk about higher education. We have an unbelievable Community College situation the El Paso Community Colleges have a number of campuses with a large number of

offerings we have UTEP is here University of Texas El Paso Southwest we have a number of colleges and universities here, but I'll probably save that for a different video But some of the other things though that I found as I was just kind of looking into the education thing here

Found a lot of really cool articles about how we have the Fort Bliss which is the army base here found a lot of great articles about how soldiers are volunteering within the schools and that there's kind of a Community Connection I guess between the schools and the military which I thought was interesting

found a really cool article about some high school students that did a Study involving the water quality of the Rio Grande and received from some pretty significant recognition for their efforts and again sports huge here music is huge and so Again, pretty unique time right here for education. I can't imagine being a teacher right now

So I'm happy that I'm in this field, but my field's blown up a little bit, too I guess everybody's field has has blown up because of coronavirus But anyway, I hope you found this information valuable If you have more questions about the schools is something that I forgot or left out drop a comment

Give me a call. Shoot me a text. Send me an email and until next time. We'll see you later That's one thing I'll give you even a negative of El Paso You're gonna make a little less money if the company that you're working for let's say you transfer here in El Paso There's a chance that you would make less money

because the company's gonna take into account the cost of living right when I did the comparison between El Paso and Orlando a salary of fifty thousand dollars in El Paso should increase to about sixty four thousand in Orlando, so That that would help because then the company let's say that I lived here in El Paso and then I took the same job In Orlando my salary might see an increase right and that would then help me to try to cover that

88% more housing costs now. Good luck on that. But um, you know, it's still pretty pretty Interesting information. So thank you so much If there is anything that we can do for you, please consider reaching out and we will see you next time