Geographic Arbitrage

Cash Flow Freed is Income minus the Maintained Lifestyle Spend needed in the new city. When the destination's COL index is higher than the origin's, the COL ratio exceeds 1, which pushes Maintained Lifestyle Spend above your original income -- meaning it would take MORE money, not less, to keep the same standard of living there. A negative Cash Flow Freed figure is the model telling you that move would tighten your budget, not loosen it, unless your income also increases.

Raising the destination COL index (COL index to) increases both the Maintained Lifestyle Spend and the COL ratio, and it decreases Cash Flow Freed -- a more expensive destination directly eats into the savings a relocation could otherwise free up, regardless of what the origin's cost of living looks like. This relationship holds for any non-zero Current Spending and any origin index; at zero Current Spending there is nothing to reduce, so Cash Flow Freed stays flat at zero regardless of the destination index.

Not directly -- the model scales off Current Spending, not gross income, so raising income alone changes nothing here unless you also raise Current Spending to match. Current Spending scales the Maintained Lifestyle Spend figure proportionally, but has no effect on the COL Ratio itself, since that ratio is purely the destination index divided by the origin index. Whether more spending also translates to more Cash Flow Freed depends on whether the COL ratio is above or below 1 for the specific move being modeled.

A COL ratio of 1 means the origin and destination cost-of-living indexes are identical, so Maintained Lifestyle Spend equals your current income exactly and Cash Flow Freed comes out to zero -- the model finds no financial arbitrage benefit from that particular move. This can happen even between very different-feeling cities if their overall cost indexes happen to land at the same number, since the index is a single blended figure across many spending categories, not a category-by-category comparison.