If Hawaii Costs $165K a Year, How Could You Afford To Live There?

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Want to move to Hawaii? Start saving your pennies, because it ain’t cheap. 

A 2025 study by SmartAsset found that it costs the average single person $124,467 per year to live in Hawaii. For a family of four, that number jumps to $294,362. A couple often spends around $165,000. 

Still, you can get creative to make the numbers work, even on a modest salary. Try these strategies to afford island life on a budget. 

Find a Way To Trim Housing Costs

Housing makes up the largest portion of your budget, and that goes doubly in Hawaii where Zillow reports the average rent as $3,200. 

Start by looking beyond the high-priced tourist areas. Get outside of Maui and Honolulu for better deals on homes. 

“Consider house hacking: Purchasing a duplex or home with an ADU to rent out and offset the mortgage,” urges real estate investor Oren Sofrin of Eagle Cash Buyers.

For that matter, you could rent out bedrooms to housemates if you prefer a single-family home. Or as a renter, you could negotiate a discounted lease and then sublet bedrooms at a premium. 

Ditch a Car

Owning a car costs more than you realize. Between auto insurance, repairs, maintenance, gas and of course the car itself, AAA reports the average new car costs $12,297 per year to own. 

Can you share one car as a household? Could you go entirely carless? 

Melanie Musson, personal finance expert at Clearsurance.com, encourages anyone looking to tighten their budget to go through this thought exercise.

“If you’re able to work close enough to where you live to walk or bike, you could eliminate a car and save thousands every year,” Musson said.

Shop Local

Anything shipped in from outside Hawaii costs far more than it does on the mainland. 

Learn how to cook delicious meals with local ingredients such as seafood, pork, chicken, avocados, papayas, and macadamia nuts. Shop at farmers markets serving locals rather than tourists. Ditch the expensive beef and wine imports at the chain grocery store. 

Embrace Free Hobbies

Meals out at restaurants are a luxury. Beyond learning how to cook like a local, embrace hobbies that don’t cost a dime. Fortunately, Hawaii offers world-class surfing, hiking, swimming, and beaches for reading or just watching the sunset. 

Earn More

While you can and should get creative to cut your budget, attack the problem from the other side as well: Earning more money. 

That can mean negotiating a raise or taking a new job with a pay bump. Or it can mean picking up a side hustle such as offering surf lessons or guided tours, leading tourist hikes, bartending, offering handyman or cleaning services, or a thousand other ways to earn money on the side. For that matter, you can work remotely doing freelance work from Hawaii like anywhere else in the world. 

Get scrappy to combine cost-cutting with higher earnings, and you’ll find yourself saying “mahalo” from the beach in no time.

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