Where You Live in Illinois May Determine Your Holiday Budget

So, have you got your holiday budgeting figured out? You know the drill: how much do I have to spend (assuming you don't want a credit card bomb to go off in your mailbox in January), and how much of it do I spend on the people on my gift list. It might be that your city of residence will help determine the answers.

Depending on where you live in Illinois, your shopping tab for the holidays could range from $350 to as much as $1,500, according to a new study. To give consumers a better sense of their spending range relative to where they live, the personal finance website WalletHub used its own algorithm to compare 570 U.S. cities across five key indicators: income, age, debt-to-income ratio, monthly income-to-monthly expenses ratio and savings-to-month expenses ratio. The National Retail Federation projects the nationwide average spending level to be about $936 per person, compared to $806 in 2015. At more than $2,800, residents of Palo Alto, California are estimated to have the biggest holiday budget in the country.

Here's how WalletHub came up with their numbers:

At a high level, our algorithm considers someone with 1) enough emergency savings to cover at least six months of expenses and 2) a debt-to-income ratio smaller than 22 percent for a renter and 43 percent for a homeowner as being in a comfortable position to engage in holiday spending.

More than a dozen Illinois cities made WalletHub's national list of rankings. Below is the list of Illinois cities, followed by their national ranking, then the average amount residents of that city have set aside to spend for the holidays:

Arlington Heights (#28) ($1,459)

Schaumburg (#50) ($1,271)

Naperville (#62) ($1,187)

Skokie (#63) ($1,160)

Bloomington (#68) ($1,125)

Springfield (#108) ($922)

Bolingbrook (#117) ($898)

Waukegan (#128) ($882)

Peoria (#129) ($880)

Palatine (#133) ($872)

Evanston (#158) ($819)

Decatur (#189) ($743)