What to buy with the equivalent of your state’s median home value

Buying a home is one of the most important financial decisions a person will make, but that’s because it’s the most money a person will spend on one thing in their lifetime. Homebuyers in Hawaii, where the median home value is $504,500, will spend considerably more than those in West Virginia, where the median home value is $100,200. It makes you wonder, what else could you buy for the same price? Don’t worry, Estately has determined an equivalent purchase that matches the median home values of each state.

HAWAII—$504,500
For the same amount as the median home value in Hawaii you could enjoy over 59,000 lbs. of poi—a traditional Polynesian food made from the steamed stem of the underground taro plant.
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA—$454,500
Instead of a home, you could hire four full-time lobbyists to glad-hand and grease the gears of our democratic system for a full year on your behalf.
CALIFORNIA—$371,400
If you think buying a home in California is expensive, try booking Nickelback to perform at your birthday party, graduation, or outside of your worst enemy’s house.
MASSACHUSETTS—$329,900
Want to buy a vowel? You can buy 1,319 of them on Wheel of Fortune. That’s enough vowels to spell “Pat Sajak wears a toupee” 131 times.
NEW JERSEY—$319,900
For the price of a New Jersey home a person could buy 3,321 lucky couples these velour tracksuits from Kohl’s and Macy’s.
MARYLAND—$287,500
For the same price, the Baltimore Ravens could pay the NFL fines for their entire starting defense and Coach Harbaugh if they were all flagged for verbally abusing an NFL official. Or you could get five years of tuition at Johns Hopkins University.
NEW YORK—$283,700
That’s enough to buy 1,602 orchestra level tickets for a Friday night showing of the Broadway musical Hamilton.
CONNECTICUT—$274,500
Owning a roof over your head in Connecticut is the monetary equivalent of gifting 2,196 of Edible Arrangements’ award-winning “Delicious Celebration® – Dipped Fruit Delight.”
WASHINGTON—$257,200
For the price of a Washington home, you can enjoy a tall latte every morning at Starbucks for the next 204 years (provided prices don’t go up), or you can book Macklemore to perform once at your garage sale.
ALASKA—$246,300
You could buy a log cabin in Alaska for a quarter-million dollars, or you could instead buy 88 truckloads of these awesome 14-inch chainsaw-carved bears (6,157 total) from Alaska Chain Saw Carvings.
VIRGINIA—$243,500
Virginia’s come a long way, baby. Once an outpost for lonely tobacco farmers yearning to be free of their British overlords, now it’s a state for lovers, and a home is worth the equivalent of 46,380 packs of Virginia Slims 120s, but without the cancer risk.
RHODE ISLAND—$241,500
Why buy a house in Rhode Island when you can buy an entire island of your own for about the same price ($235,000). Sure, the name of it is Hangover Island, and that’s not exactly appealing, but it is in Florida.
COLORADO—$239,400
You can buy 5,700 used Tim Tebow Broncos jerseys on eBay, or 61 lbs. of high-quality weed. You cannot buy both.
NEW HAMPSHIRE—$237,400
You could buy four years of tuition at Dartmouth College, or you could get season tickets for you and 345 of your closest friends to the New Hampshire Fisher Cats, the local minor league baseball team.
OREGON—$234,100
Homeownership isn’t for everyone. For some, the fullness of their facial hair is more important, and for the price of an Oregon home a person could buy enough beard implants to fill in the patchy beards of 33 hipsters.
DELAWARE—$232,900
Living in one of the smallest of U.S. states can really make you feel cooped up. Stretch your legs a little (not literally) with a roundtrip Greyhound bus ride from Wilmington, DE to Colorado Springs, CO AND entry to the ProRodeo Hall of Fame. You can even bring 605 friends, random strangers, or other Delaware rodeo enthusiasts.
VERMONT—$216,200
For the price of a Vermont home, you could make 8,007 donations to Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign for the average donation price of $27. Or, if that’s not your thing, you can make one really big donation to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.
UTAH—$212,500
People who say a home is the biggest purchase you’ll ever make in life have obviously never dropped a couple hundred thousand dollars on a used Lamborghini.
WYOMING—$189,300
The median home value in Wyoming is $189,300, which is just enough to buy you two years worth of daily rodeo lessons from Putnam Horsemanship.
MONTANA—$187,600
You and 31 of your closest friends can get the full six-week course at the Advanced Taxidermy Training Center of NW Montana. You’ll be stuffing mule deer and mounting trophy bass faster than it takes most people to drop out of Princeton.
MINNESOTA—$185,200
For the same price as the median home value in Minnesota, you could buy 154,849 lbs (77 tons) of Ore-Ida tater tots, enough to make one hotdish (tater tot casserole) every day for the next 424 years.
ILLINOIS—$175,700
The median home value in Illinois is the same amount as the price of 64 adorable baby lemurs.
MAINE—$173,600
Someday the good people at Archie McPhee are going to stop selling Handerpants, and when their supply is out there’s going to be a considerable black market for these supportive briefs you wear under your gloves. You could stock up on 14,527 pairs for the price of a home in Maine.
NEVADA—$167,100
The average private investigator costs about $50 per hour, which means for the price of the average Nevada home, you could hire one to work 139 days straight to find out just what exactly happened in Vegas.
WISCONSIN—$165,900
A roof over your head is great, but is it worth more than ensuring your local ice rink’s surface is smooth and skateable? For the same price as a home you could buy a brand new Zamboni 552 Electric Ice Resurfacer, which is some top-of-the-line machinery.
PENNSYLVANIA—$164,900
Pennsylvania is one of the few states that allow people to own alligators. Area residents could order up to 867 of these ferocious amphibians from Backwater Reptiles for the price of an average Pennsylvania home.
ARIZONA—$162,900
When it comes to gun ownership in America, keeping up with the Joneses and their growing arsenal of assault weapons is proving extremely difficult. However, for the price of an average Arizona home you can buy not one, not two, but three T-34 Tiger Killer Tanks. It reaches speeds of 55 km/h and it seats four.
IDAHO—$160,500
If you want to roam the wilds of Idaho with your trusty rifle in search of four-legged protein, you’re going to need government permission, and $160,500 will buy you 385 elk tags (permits for nonresidents to hunt Idaho elk).
NEW MEXICO—$159,300
Humans have inhabited homes for thousands of years, so that’s the past. Jetpacks are the future, and Martin Aircraft expects to release its functional jetpack to the public in 2017. The cost is $150,000, which leaves $9,300 for jetpack insurance.
FLORIDA—$156,200
Florida republicans love Donald Trump, even more than their former governor and current senator. So why not stock up on Trump campaign hats? Because Trump Steaks and Trump Vodka are no longer available.
NORTH CAROLINA—$153,600
Michael Oher, starting right tackle for the Carolina Panthers, is best known as the inspiration for the 2009 film The Blind Side. What’s less known is that the 315-lb. lineman will receive a $150,000 bonus if he shows up for voluntary workouts in 2016. That’s enough to buy a home in North Carolina. Not bad for someone who was once homeless as a kid.
GEORGIA—$148,000
Is it just a coincidence The Walking Dead takes place in Georgia? Probably not. The zombie apocalypse will surely begin in neighboring Florida and then quickly stream into Georgia. For the same cost of a Georgia home, you and 327 of your friends and neighbors can learn to protect yourselves from the undead horde with Zombie Survival Camp’s weekend training.
NORTH DAKOTA—$142,000
If you enjoy cold the cold and isolation of North Dakota, but grow tired of high winds roaring across the plains, consider moving to the moon. Thanks to the Lunar Registry, through an exclusive alliance with the Luna Society, you can purchase land in the “Sea of Tranquility—the moon’s most prestigious location”. Priced at $37.50 per acre, one could buy up nearly six square miles of prime moon real estate for the price of a North Dakota home.
LOUISIANA—$140,400
You’d need to invite over a lot of friends, and you’d have to also buy a lot of cold beer, as well as corn and potatoes, but you’d definitely have an epic crawfish boil.
TENNESSEE—$139,900
That’s enough cash to buy yourself 83 continuous days of guitar lessons from Green Hills Guitar Studio. Nashville fame and fortune awaits!
SOUTH CAROLINA—$137,600
You could buy a home in South Carolina, or you could host a cookout for the whole county and serve delicious shrimp and grits (9,000 pounds of shrimp and 1,250 pounds of grits).
MISSOURI—$136,700
Amassing enemies is easy to do. Getting payback is much harder… or is it? Exact your revenge on 471 enemies with the Trojan horse-style gift of a hoverboard. It looks like a fun gadget, but it can cause injury and even catch fire.
SOUTH DAKOTA—$135,700
For the price of a South Dakota home, you could play laser tag nonstop for 565 days at Galaxy Gaming in Sioux Falls.
TEXAS—$131,400
Everyone knows the stars at night are big and bright deep in the heart of Texas, which is handy because you can officially name 2,433 of them for the cost of a Texas home.
NEBRASKA—$130,100
Vegans have it rough in beef-loving Nebraska, but they could still sell their homes and buy 63,000 pounds of organic tofu, or roughly the equivalent of six full-grown Angus steers.
OHIO—$129,600
Camel milk, even camel milk produced in Ohio, is pretty expensive. If you wanted to straight-up swap the average Ohio home, you’d only get 900 gallons of raw camel milk from Desert Farms for it.
KANSAS—$129,400
Everyone knows Kansans love their guinea pigs, and they’d do anything to keep them safe from harm, but would they go so far as to purchase them protective chain mail and armor? For just the price of an average Kansas home a person could provide armor for five guinea pigs ($24,300 a pop).
IOWA—$126,300
Become champion of the church potluck with 25,000 pounds of potato salad. Or purchase 1,403 autographed photographs of popular popcorn pioneer Orville Redenbacher on eBay.
ALABAMA—$123,800
Alabama Crimson Tide football coach Nick Saban makes an annual salary of $7 million, which comes out to $125,000 per quarter played (counting SEC championship and any bowl game). That’s roughly the same as the median home value in Alabama.
INDIANA—$122,700
For the same price, you can buy three Spend-a-Night Tornado Shelters from Atlas Survival Shelters. Each of the 10′ diameter x 20′ long underground shelters comes with four bunkbeds, an entertainment center, and an NBC air-filtration system (total $39,900 a piece).
KENTUCKY—$121,600
Got a large garden with an aphid problem? Ladybugs are nature’s all-natural insecticide, feasting on aphids and other plant-eating insects. For the cost of an average Kentucky home, you can purchase nearly 17 million of the little guys off of Amazon (shipping included).
MICHIGAN—$120,200
In the event the earth turns into a post-apocalyptic hellscape, you’re going to want transportation for you and your crew that shows you’re no one to mess with. The JL41 Badonkadonk Land Cruiser/Tank, or apocalypse wagon as its popularly called, is that mode of transportation. You can buy five of them for the price of a Michigan home. Not only does it carry up to five people inside or on the roof, it also reaches a top speed of 40 mph and has a 400-watt PA system. It would also make a great golf cart.
OKLAHOMA—$115,000
The Tesla X P90D costs $115,500 cash and it goes from 0-60 in 3.8 seconds, which is almost as fast as Kevin Durant is going to depart the Oklahoma City Thunder when free agency begins. That’ll teach you to steal another state’s basketball team.
ARKANSAS—$108,700
The prize for snatching the title for most obese U.S. state from the clutches of Mississippi and West Virginia is knowing a median-priced Arkansas home costs as much as 13,080 pounds of cereal marshmallows.
MISSISSIPPI—$100,800
For the price of a Mississippi home, one could buy more than 4,000 dunce caps, which would leave plenty to spare even after doling out one to the governor and each of the 37 members of the Mississippi State Senate who recently approved a bill to allow greater freedom to those who discriminate against the LGBT community.
WEST VIRGINIA—$100,200
What does the lowest median home value in America buy you? How about 2,300 pounds of coal, but no giant stocking to put it in.