Girl on the Brink: Surviving Desperate Times with Desperate Measures

I’ve read that I should not limit my job search to the geographic area I live in, that having a job, any job, is better than not having one, even if it is someplace else.

I agree with that advice. But I’m not going to move to Fort Wayne, Indiana, or any place I’d have to look up on a map. Moving to a third-tier city (sorry to offend anyone) would crush my chances of finding a wealthy Mr. Right, right?

I don’t want to obsess about finding a rich man, but my girlfriend says I deserve one, and there are men out there who would cherish a woman like me. I should be able to find at least one. I’m still a size 4, have a nip in my waist and a bright, dark blond head on my shoulders. My skin is soft, and I don’t have any chin hairs. All my working parts work, which would be more noticeable on a man if they didn’t.

I knew there had to be a strategy to the madness of finding both a rich man and a high-income job, and I figured out how to get the U.S. Census to possibly help me. Here’s the plan I tried.

Since I’m looking for a wealthy guy, I needed to increase my chances of finding one, which means I needed to identify where they live. I call this Zip Code dating. I needed to find the highest-income Zip Codes in the nation and then look for a job there. But there is too much noise on the Internet if you do a brute search, and I wanted to get this calculation right.

But do you know you can query ask.census.gov and get an answer within 24 hours? It’s worth the wait. To answer my question, I narrowed my search to the top 10 wealthiest Zip Codes.

I did get a reply in 24 hours.  But, bummer.  There’s not an easy answer. To find the prime hunting grounds, I would have to download 33,178 Zip Code Tabulation Area files from the 2000 census, the latest (all public info, so it is possible) from the American FactFinder Download Center, and then crunch the numbers myself. Sounds like a lot of work; too much work, and the census person who answered my question made a point of telling me that the income levels included in the census don’t go beyond someone making $250,000 a year.

So maybe guessing isn’t such a bad idea. Okay, I think rich guys live in New York City, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, Miami, Chicago—pretty much the big urban places, which is fine by me. I’m a big city kind of girl.