I am 34 years old working remotely as data scientist, making $107k TC. My wife who I've been married to for 13 years is a stay-at-home mother as we have two children in grade school. Since they are in the school she is turning in our half-acre into a sustainable garden with chickens. We own our home, are financially comfortable while saving $1500 a month, and travel. We were planning a 2-month trip to Japan this upcoming summer until we realized the Olympics are held there in 2020. In the end we will shift dates around to make it work.
Aside from being active duty for 11 years which allowed me to complete through two graduate degrees without any student debt, was taking my first role after the military in a small town one and half hours from the nearest city; a small city at that. I stayed there for four years to get comfortable enough to work on my own without any oversight; soaked up all possible learning opportunities. When switching roles to my current job, I negotiated to work remotely, now I live 2500 miles from my employer. Cost of living is the same, but now I don't have to purchase airline tickets to see family.
The number one advantage I see compared to others comes from the military. I complete all tasks asigned without complaining, and get them down without bothering those above me. Doesn't matter the task, if it is assigned and needs to be completed, I do it. Sometimes these are trivial, others would say beneath them, others are writing patent paperwork with the co-founder. This mindset has worked two-fold, I touch numerous areas of the business so my skill-set is well rounded, and my bosses are happy; work gets done without their involvement.
Live below your means, take advantage of where you live, and maintain a simple life. Good things come to those who wait.
You touched on the education without student loans is a major benefit to the military. Another is the ability to buy a home with no money down and not have to pay mortgage insurance. It's easy for those in the military to feel like life is passing them by as they witness cohorts graduating earlier etc. but those benefits can make a big difference in the long run (not to mention the intangibles you brought up).
That is true, but my wife and I were also separated for half of our first three years of marriage. As I deployed and shortly after I returned she deployed. We were also stationed in Turkey where at 4 months pregnant we learned the military would not allow her to give birth there anymore. She had to fly to the US with our older daughter at 7 months pregnant by herself and stay there until she gave birth. There are many pros to the military which have benefited us, but also many stresses those outside the military never deal with.
I am substantially younger, make exactly 100k/yr live within commuting distance of a grossly overpriced city full of people I want nothing to do with (read: expensive urban area known for tech and medicine) and made 90k/yr when I bought my house. I live in an city, not a nearly rural suburb, but it's not a rich city (thank god) but it has everything I need. I'm paying a few hundred dollars a month on debt, have a similarly sized discretionary budget, am maxing out my 401k and slowly building savings. The schools aren't great but they aren't bad, not my problem yet anyway.
My buddy who is a teacher makes substantially less and has approximately the same situation but in a different slightly wealthier city and has a slightly smaller house.
The DB administrator at my last job who was in his late 20s and made about 100k had the same situation in yet a different city.
100k is not a crazy number in this area. If you are in a blue collar trade you can make 100k by putting in your years to get licensed (BS gate keeping requirements make it impossible to get licenses/certs in most trades in this state without working several years) you can commute into that rich overpriced city that shall remain nameless and make 100k.
The house across the block from me is on the market for ~200k. 150k on up seems to be the going rate for a turnkey single family house around here depending on size and condition. These aren't crazy prices. They're just not a neighborhood your snooty coworkers will approve of. My house was 150k but needed 20k of siding (screw that, next time I'm taking the week off from work, buying the staging and doing it my damn self for a fraction of the price) on day 1 and has never been updated inside.
If you want to own a home and are willing to work for it you can own a home. You just can't own one in a neighborhood where everyone is richer than you.
>Live below your means, take advantage of where you live, and maintain a simple life. Good things come to those who wait.
Fully agree here. Simple life is key. You can't drive a nice car and go out drinking all the time and all those other things that cost money. You can do a few of them but you've gotta choose.
I see that you're very adamant on keeping the location anonymous, but I am vastly curious as to what region you are referencing to. I'm thinking perhaps Baltimore-Washington Area or even Houston.
That is a good possibility. I complete the work assigned to me while being able to get a 1.5-hour workout at the gym and my wife does a 20 to a 50 mile bike ride every day. TC might be low but my and my family's health appears far better than most of my peers. Less money, but our health is a better long term investment.
$100,000 still a lot of money. You can buy a beer in Vietnam for 20 cents. The problem in the Bay Area, where I live, is we artificially limit the amount of housing. So prices move to infinity.
I used to work for a company that had about half of its employees in India, and I was curious about the cost of living there. Looking at apartments in a major city, they were not a great deal cheaper than the US. People frequently claim lower salaries in countries other than the US are balanced by cheaper prices, but my impression is that a developed-world style apartment and car are usually comparably expensive pretty much anywhere, from London to Noida. Mathematically, cheaper rice can't make up for it if you are making enough to live in an urban area.
Similarly, a good chunk of urban housing in Canada, Australia and NZ are priced completely out of line with what median salaries in those areas could afford.
These are likely houses marketed towards "investors", aka rich people who don't need a mortgage or have a network of private lenders who specialize in providing credit for the house-flipping industry.
I would say that is a problem in any place where it is desirable to live these days. Locations I've experienced first hand: London, Sydney, Bay area, Los Angeles, Vancouver... and I'm sure there are many more where you can't buy on that salary.
Not in all desirable players. Only ones that limit construction. Meanwhile in desirable places which allow more construction, like Tokyo, housing prices have stabilized [1].
First, to talk about the place I know best, cities in the UK outside London are pretty expensive too. The UK has a disproportionate share of the world's expensive cities, despite being a relatively middle-income country. Demand isn't rising fast, it is just impossible to build (usually due to "environmental" planning regulations). That is an unforced error.
Second, there are examples of large cities that don't have these issues. Berlin is probably one of the most well-known examples, they had a ton of public housing. They started breaking some of these buildings up, and guess what...rents are going up.
Third, it is worth getting some perspective on this. There are cities that have almost no land that have managed much higher growth. Property in Singapore, for example, is expensive by international standards but, given per capita incomes and given the population density, they have actually not done badly (particularly when you look at access instead of average price). That is equally true of China (some cities in China have gone for 0 to millions of people...this makes the growth in most Western cities look flaccid). You could even say that New York has managed this reasonably well too (there has been investment in transport infrastructure at least, which is another cause of rising prices in some cities).
It is hard to generalise about this because policy is often made locally. But I think it is also clear that part of the problem is local policy causing a problem in aggregate. That is systemic and unrelated to demand.
For many residents, building more housing and letting more people in would irreparably change the “character” of the neighborhood. This can mean more crime, traffic, and pollution.
Past a certain density automotive transportation becomes unfeasable and people will be forced to rely on public or other alternative forms of transportation like walking or riding a bike.
Reducing housing costs would mean changing the way we build cities,shifting to a European or Asian model. Whereas most Californians are very attached to their way of living.
Rising housing prices are already dramatically changing SF. If you want to let residents maintain their way of living, I don't see how thats achieved by pricing poorer residents out of the city entirely. I'm sure most residents would prefer to live in apartments in SF than move to another city entirely.
As for transport, cars are already pretty unfeasable in SF with the population as is. Whats so bad about investing more in public transit and biking?
As for crime and traffic, most larger cities in Europe are much cleaner and safer than SF. More residents means city hall has more money to play with, which it can re-invest into schools, parks, the police, public transit and other things. Cheaper accomodation makes it easier to re-house homeless people and it makes homeless shelters more affordable for the city.
I'm not fond of the slippery slope argument, particularly when it comes from NIMBY's that bought their houses when markets were at a low because nobody wanted to live in these cities.
Bay area residents, Seattle residents, etc need to get over themselves and accept reality for what it is. They aren't protecting anything but their own sense of self-worth and the "theory" that bad things will happen if a 3 story apartment complex comes into the neighborhood.
The reality is, most of them want their property values insanely high, for when they are ready to sell and move to cheaper cities.
While a lot of people complain about "NIMBY" in the bay area, it's never been clear to me why I have an obligation to rearrange the area I live in to accommodate others who want to live here. People speak about a "shortage of housing", but another way of saying this is that there is a "surplus of high paying jobs". If someone can't afford to live here, then economic forces should make it more attractive to live elsewhere. Employers should see this as well, and relocate their business elsewhere. That's what happened with Intel, and many companies are now focusing their growth outside the bay area.
Just increasing housing density without solving transportation problems will result in a seriously changed lifestyle here, and that is what many people fear. Moreover, efforts to build better transportation in the bay area have been very ineffective. The light rail in Santa Clara County is a good example of this - it crawls through downtown San Jose, has very little ridership, and recovers only a small fraction of operating costs from fares. The jobs have almost always showed up in areas where there is an existing shortage of transit and housing - e.g., Sunnyvale, Cupertino, Mountain View, and Palo Alto. At this point the only feasible solution is to turn 101 and 85 into bus-only roads. No more single occupancy vehicles. Then let the market sort out how to provide transit for employers. That would be massively disruptive to existing lifestyles, but probably the only feasible way to increase transportation throughput in the face of increased housing density.
Most of the readership on hacker news is in the tech industry, but I think the biggest problem with housing in the bay area is for non-tech workers.
It’s a lot compared to 10k/year, but not when trying to buy a decent pad in the Bay Area.
Income is extremely relative. Age, health, dependents, quality of life, location, expectations, etc etc. I had a fantastic quality of life on 10k/year many moons ago, for instance. But everything is always changing. I learned recently that the atoms that make up our bodies change in large quantities from moment to moment :-o
The “happiest man on earth” according to fmri studies led by the Dalai Lama at the Mind And Life Institute lives on $50/mo and donated all his money from book sales to helping the poor. Source: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000SEUSXW/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
> The problem in the Bay Area, where I live, is we artificially limit the amount of housing. So prices move to infinity.
The article doesn't talk about people not being able to afford housing, it talks about them renting in desirable areas rather than buying elsewhere. If anything, it's about a rent/buy price spread resulting from housing inventory being taken up by investors who prefer to own and rent out rather than sell, driving up purchase prices to a greater multiple of rent prices than would otherwise be the case. Which, if viewed as problematic, is not a problem that building more housing solves. You'd have to also make it less attractive to be a landlord.
I live in London. I'm not on 100K, however my salary is higher than 90% of the UK's population.If I'd compare our family income,we are better off than 75% of the country's households.These are just the stats. All 3 of us live in a one bedroom,rented flat in a decent area. We wouldn't even get a mortgage for the flat we live in (£300K)...The neighbors bought a house next door for £1M. Only pensioners and businessmen own properties on my street,the rest are renting. So realistically,unless I start making 50% more than I do now, there's no way this will ever change. I guess I should start looking at those remote Salesforce jobs in Bay area...
90th percentile puts you on around £55k, for which you could absolutely get a mortgage on a £300k property (assuming you have a 10% deposit and your partner earns an average salary).
There are many places throughout the south, midwest and northeast with decent job markets and dirt cheap housing. The mortgage on my 1800 sq foot house is nearly a third of the cost of my tiny one bedroom back in Seattle. The cost of the entire house is a tenth of a house in the Bay Area.
I am fortunate to work remotely but when deciding where to live I wanted to be able to afford to keep this roof over my families' head even if I didn't have a Bay Area/Seattle gig. I think the biggest obstacle may be coming up with enough cash to secure the financing in the first place, and for that I am grateful to have lived and worked in a tech hub.
How does your total comp fare relative to Seattle? I’m living in downtown Seattle now working for Amazon. I’ve been here almost 8 years. My TC is north of $300K, but the mental strain this fucking company has had on me has me constantly on the edge. I’m thinking about leaving to join another FANG company or drop out of big tech all together.
Remote work is becoming more "real" by the day, so it's certainly possible in the age of the internet to work remotely in a low cost location while making a salary competitive with a higher cost of living city like SF/NY/LA.
I do this and I want other people to know it's possible too.
I'm putting together a list of the best places to live for remote workers with families, hoping to turn it into a little website that you can filter by schools, available internet speeds, median house price, that sort of thing.
Hopefully it will help someone out there when there's more data.
Problem is a lot of companies get smart and "pay by location". I've seen big cos from the Bay offering half the salary (before currency exchange) for workers in Vancouver.
Small town America will have $500 / month for a 2-bedroom apartment, while paying medical-doctors $200k+ / year.
But you may be the only doctor around for 10s of miles. Which is why you'd be so valuable. I'm sure there are other $100k to $200k jobs that small towns need.
No, you won't get high-tech or programming in small-town America. But there's more to life than just the tech-field. Its easy to forget because we're mostly programmers in this website.
If you consider automation to be sufficiently tech-y, there's still plenty of jobs like those around, particularly in the rust belt. The people I knew in this area lived in small towns and got paid well enough to live in neighborhoods surrounded by medical doctors.
Part of the problem is these jobs don't have the sex appeal of SV tech so they aren't on people's radar or just not considered desirable because of the nature of manufacturing work.
the sweet spot in terms of arbitrage right now is: find full time employment at a high earning job in a major metro area, move far enough from that metro area to work remote while being able to come into the office a handful of times per month.
A three hour commute is easier when you only do it twice a week, or a few times a month.
In the grand scheme of things, even $200K is not a lot of money. I made record this year (~$320K), but I end up saving it all. Can I afford to buy a home? Absolutely. Will I buy a home? Absolutely not. Let’s say I purchase an $650K home outside Seattle and commute to work. I still have a huge mortgage weighing on my shoulders and I could get wiped out if my employer let me go. Just not worth the risk.
Housing in Texas is still very cheap comparatively. And salaries are $100k+ in tech. You can get a house in round Rock ( for example 1309 green terrace Dr is on the market for under $240k and it's a 2300 sqft house with a 2 car garage ) and it's an 18 minute drive from Apple and Facebook.
Look for places that other people don't want to live. There are plenty of midwestern cities with senior developer jobs paying $100k+ and a low cost of living. My two bedroom condo 20 minutes from the downtown of a major metro area was $80k.
Austin and Chicago definitely fit in that overlap. On top of that, when you compare SF to say, Cleveland, sure the median salary in SF could be 2x as high, but the median home price is close to 10x as high.
NIMBYism is going to absolutely choke the bay area over time, and newer generations of startups, VCs, and accelerators will wise up and broaden their horizons. The frequently parroted argument of "SF has the best pool of engineering talent" only goes so far.
Especially when quality engineers can move wherever they want, and Stanford and UC Berkeley aren't pumping out nearly enough CS grads to justify the absurd cost of operating for startups to stay there.
Less sarcastically: is there an index for this kind of thing? E.g. cost of living for an equivalent neighborhood plotted against median salaries for tech jobs?
A large chunk of the midwest is like that. Housing is very cheap in the small-medium cities (and the big cities are still a lot cheaper than the coasts) and you'll usually find a few local software companies + satellite offices of bigger ones that pay in that range.
There are a few different rankings that sort of assess this.
There's a CompTIA "Tech Towns" report[1] from last year that does a good breakdown of salary + job opportunities vs CoL by city.
Anecdotally, I think it was right to rank Charlotte NC at the top. It's easy to find 100k+ salary jobs there if you have experience (avg is a bit lower though) - and median housing prices are like 230k. But the big downside is that you pretty much have to be cool with working for a bank.
There are numerous cost of living calculators[0] online, but they basically just tell you how much more or less you need to earn to maintain your standards if you move to another city (not neighborhood level). Still, they're interesting.
I'm in a mini-retirement right now and living in SF. It was surprising to learn that below like $50k you basically pay 0 in income tax in California. As a single person I can very comfortably live off $40k/year in investment income and pay no taxes right now.
Unless you get very lucky with housing living off $40k/year is pretty difficult in San Francisco. Even if you manage I would definitely not call it comfortable.
I pay $2k in rent, so $24k. That leaves $1300/month for everything else. I'm easily below that most months. (No car, no drinking, cook during the week)
I don't find SF to be any more expensive than any other "big" city outside of housing cost, especially when you factor in not needing a car to get around.
Of course, on $40k/year I suppose one would be taking subsidies or medicaid instead of paying full freight. But, then I guess it could be said you can make it in SF on $0/year...
We have very different views of "very comfortably" living.
For reference, the amount you have remaining every month after paying rent is close to what I end up averaging on vacation! And I definitely don't think I live a very comfortable lifestyle. (My vacations aren't even that nice - we rent budget cars, fly max economy flights, almost always stay in the bottom 25% of AirBNBs in cost, and almost always eat at $-$$ restaurants) Compared to most Americans - clearly, I spend more on vacation. Compared to my SF Bay Area peers - I spend nothing.
I was living in San Francisco on an after tax income of $500/week for most of 2010-2011. Prices are a bit higher now, but I think I could scrape by on that amount if I had to. I wouldn't want to though.
Yeah...I realize I'm in a privileged position but just pointing out that if you're in a position to F.I.R.E. that taxes in California are actually low to nil for <$50k/yr despite its reputation as a "high tax state."
>It was surprising to learn that below like $50k you basically pay 0 in income tax in California.
Not if you're a contractor without a full-time employer. In college I did freelance work, and I lost nearly 30% to taxes despite making less than $5k a year from my work. Having your social security responsibility doubled is brutal.
The original post was talking about income tax. There are plenty of other taxes on making money by working.
But, if you're living solely off investments you don't pay those. I was surprised to see that capital gains tax is zero below a certain income. It seems rather unfair, since you can choose when to sell.
I'm not familiar with how freelancing income is different than other forms of income...isn't that just a regular 1099? Are you saying you didn't receive a tax refund during tax season?
With W2 employment, you and your employer split the payroll tax responsibility. When you're self-employed, you pay both halves.
If you adjust your rates accordingly, it's a wash for everyone involved (this is one of many reasons the 1099 price per hour should be around twice the W2 price per hour).
None of this has anything to do with CA income tax.
While housing is an issue (particularly in more prosperous coastal cities), if I made over $100k per year but couldn't afford a house in the $400k range, I don't think my response would be to rent a single-family house in Stapleton. There are more affordable apartments in the Denver area that are still in a good school district.
Articles like this are starting to annoy me because I see the working poor and lower-middle class, who have very serious financial issues today lumped in with young professionals with 2010 levels of student debt trying to live the lifestyle of young professionals in the 1980s (who were largely free of student debt) to their own financial detriment.
If you have a household income of $110k and both work in SF, you are screwed. If you have a household income of $110k and live almost anywhere else in the country, you have options.
> trying to live the lifestyle of young professionals in the 1980s
I've been interested in the subject for while, but do you know of any recommended reading material about what being a YP in the 80s was like (socially, career wise, etc) and the economics of how it was possible?
I do not have any recommended reading. I had relatives that came of age in the late 70s and early 80s, so this was personal experience.
http://www.paulgraham.com/re.html suggests that young professionals being paid more was new around this time. I don't know if this is true or not. If it is true, then this would suggest that there was a sudden increase in disposable income among young professionals. Professionals were already a small fraction of workers, and social change is usually uneven, so it seems likely that in addition not all professional jobs experienced this shift at the same time.
If you suddenly give a small fraction of the population more money then they are likely to live it up because there aren't enough of them to drive the costs up in lock-step.
The issue is less about the dollar cost of housing in most places, than the opportunity cost and closing of flexibility in getting into a long term mortgage. In all but the most obnoxiously over-priced areas, if you make $100k, you should be able to buy something on a low down-payment FHA loan, and your total mortgage payment should be less than you'd pay in rent. PMI sucks, but it's not terribly difficult to refinance out of it after a handful of years.
The problem is you're tied down to a location. The market is hot now, but even so, it is not trivial to list a house, get an offer, close, and decamp from it, and it's rare that that goes quickly. If you envision moving around from job to job, rather than settling in for the long haul, a 30-year mortgage is a ball and chain.
Struggling with rent vs buy right now for this very reason. I know financially it would be better to buy, but then you lose the flexibility to go after a great opportunity in even another part of a major city.
I was in a similar position a couple years ago, and ended up buying.
If you read the article, they mention "built to rent" houses. I bought one of these, and although I do not rent it out now, I could quite easily rent it out if a better opportunity comes along that would require me to move.
I think this is a good option for people who have the cash for a down payment, are looking for a place to live, and don't want to deal with rising rents in case they do stay, while still increasing net worth every month with the mortgage payment. You might be tied down for a year or two, but it's not like being stuck somewhere for 30 years if you have the option to rent a place out.
You know that you can sell houses before you pay off your mortgage, right?
If you aren't in an area with very high housing costs (which, obviously, very many readers of this site are), it's not even that big a deal to sell your house when you need to. If your house constitutes 40% of your net worth, and you take a 5% hit on your sale price, then your net worth has declined... 2%. A good job is worth that.
Admittedly, it's different when your house is 90% of your net worth and you're barely able to afford your mortgage.
That's both the mother AND father working to bring home $59,039 on the average (before taxes and other costs).
Its clear you live in a rich area where $100k isn't much. But that's also why a large chunk of Americans think that "city-folk" are disconnected from reality. $100k is a lot for many people.
My sister lives in an area (in USA) where a 2-bedroom apartment is just $500/month, low crime good living conditions.
Over 80% of Americans live in an urban area[1] so it's pretty absurd to claim "city-folk" represents some elite minority. Median household income in NYC is $57,782 [2]. The idea that America is split into some wealth urban minority vs a near majority of lower income rural population that understands "reality" is complete fantasy.
It doesn't change the fact that $100k is still a lot of money, but the people for whom that a lot a money aren't on some farm in the middle of the country, they're driving your uber, greeting you at the entrance to your apartment and delivering your instacart.
> That's both the mother AND father working to bring home $59,039 on the average (before taxes and other costs).
This isn't accurate. That's everyone in the household collectively working to bring home 59,039 on average. 27% of "households" are individuals. 34% of households are couples (that is to say, two people with no dependents. If they're mothers or fathers, they're empty nesters.) So only about a third of households have more than two people (presumably parents + children.)
Not sure what the median income for households with two working parents + children is.
> Its clear you live in a rich area where $100k isn't much
You mean he doesn't live out in the sticks or a run-down city like Detroit (MI), Gary (IN), or Paterson (NJ). You don't need to live in a rich area for $100k to not be that much.
Households != mother + father + children, where income is presumably higher. Households include all living situations which includes households with 1 person, households with 1 person working, etc.
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Aside from being active duty for 11 years which allowed me to complete through two graduate degrees without any student debt, was taking my first role after the military in a small town one and half hours from the nearest city; a small city at that. I stayed there for four years to get comfortable enough to work on my own without any oversight; soaked up all possible learning opportunities. When switching roles to my current job, I negotiated to work remotely, now I live 2500 miles from my employer. Cost of living is the same, but now I don't have to purchase airline tickets to see family.
The number one advantage I see compared to others comes from the military. I complete all tasks asigned without complaining, and get them down without bothering those above me. Doesn't matter the task, if it is assigned and needs to be completed, I do it. Sometimes these are trivial, others would say beneath them, others are writing patent paperwork with the co-founder. This mindset has worked two-fold, I touch numerous areas of the business so my skill-set is well rounded, and my bosses are happy; work gets done without their involvement.
Live below your means, take advantage of where you live, and maintain a simple life. Good things come to those who wait.
I am substantially younger, make exactly 100k/yr live within commuting distance of a grossly overpriced city full of people I want nothing to do with (read: expensive urban area known for tech and medicine) and made 90k/yr when I bought my house. I live in an city, not a nearly rural suburb, but it's not a rich city (thank god) but it has everything I need. I'm paying a few hundred dollars a month on debt, have a similarly sized discretionary budget, am maxing out my 401k and slowly building savings. The schools aren't great but they aren't bad, not my problem yet anyway.
My buddy who is a teacher makes substantially less and has approximately the same situation but in a different slightly wealthier city and has a slightly smaller house.
The DB administrator at my last job who was in his late 20s and made about 100k had the same situation in yet a different city.
100k is not a crazy number in this area. If you are in a blue collar trade you can make 100k by putting in your years to get licensed (BS gate keeping requirements make it impossible to get licenses/certs in most trades in this state without working several years) you can commute into that rich overpriced city that shall remain nameless and make 100k.
The house across the block from me is on the market for ~200k. 150k on up seems to be the going rate for a turnkey single family house around here depending on size and condition. These aren't crazy prices. They're just not a neighborhood your snooty coworkers will approve of. My house was 150k but needed 20k of siding (screw that, next time I'm taking the week off from work, buying the staging and doing it my damn self for a fraction of the price) on day 1 and has never been updated inside.
If you want to own a home and are willing to work for it you can own a home. You just can't own one in a neighborhood where everyone is richer than you.
>Live below your means, take advantage of where you live, and maintain a simple life. Good things come to those who wait.
Fully agree here. Simple life is key. You can't drive a nice car and go out drinking all the time and all those other things that cost money. You can do a few of them but you've gotta choose.
$100k/yr gross household income would make it rough to own a 3/2 single family home in South Florida.
3158 SW 153rd Path #3158 Miami, FL 33185 $329,900 3 Bed 2.5 Bath Est monthly $2620
[0] https://www.redfin.com/FL/Miami/3158-SW-153rd-Path-33185/uni...
It's not a walk in the park, but it's not "rough" either; 2620 a month after a ~6000/mo post-tax draw leaves you with 3380/mo for food, saving, etc.
IMO, in the optimal situation, both parties are a little unhappy.
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A friend’s mother sold a 1000 sq ft home in Saigon for $250,000. New apartments are often $100k+.
Considering the average wage is $6,000 in Saigon, the housing is outrageous.
These are likely houses marketed towards "investors", aka rich people who don't need a mortgage or have a network of private lenders who specialize in providing credit for the house-flipping industry.
Glass is a pretty good insulator and generally weather-proof, UV-resistant etc, and cheap to produce.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottbeyer/2016/08/12/tokyos-af...
First, to talk about the place I know best, cities in the UK outside London are pretty expensive too. The UK has a disproportionate share of the world's expensive cities, despite being a relatively middle-income country. Demand isn't rising fast, it is just impossible to build (usually due to "environmental" planning regulations). That is an unforced error.
Second, there are examples of large cities that don't have these issues. Berlin is probably one of the most well-known examples, they had a ton of public housing. They started breaking some of these buildings up, and guess what...rents are going up.
Third, it is worth getting some perspective on this. There are cities that have almost no land that have managed much higher growth. Property in Singapore, for example, is expensive by international standards but, given per capita incomes and given the population density, they have actually not done badly (particularly when you look at access instead of average price). That is equally true of China (some cities in China have gone for 0 to millions of people...this makes the growth in most Western cities look flaccid). You could even say that New York has managed this reasonably well too (there has been investment in transport infrastructure at least, which is another cause of rising prices in some cities).
It is hard to generalise about this because policy is often made locally. But I think it is also clear that part of the problem is local policy causing a problem in aggregate. That is systemic and unrelated to demand.
High living costs are a self imposed problem: housing regulation and zoning.
Had zero problem saving up a down payment in a couple years. Brand new houses were $150k and older, nice home were $90k.
Of course the job prospects aren’t as good as a major city, but housing isn’t a major issue.
For many residents, building more housing and letting more people in would irreparably change the “character” of the neighborhood. This can mean more crime, traffic, and pollution.
Past a certain density automotive transportation becomes unfeasable and people will be forced to rely on public or other alternative forms of transportation like walking or riding a bike.
Reducing housing costs would mean changing the way we build cities,shifting to a European or Asian model. Whereas most Californians are very attached to their way of living.
Rising housing prices are already dramatically changing SF. If you want to let residents maintain their way of living, I don't see how thats achieved by pricing poorer residents out of the city entirely. I'm sure most residents would prefer to live in apartments in SF than move to another city entirely.
As for transport, cars are already pretty unfeasable in SF with the population as is. Whats so bad about investing more in public transit and biking?
As for crime and traffic, most larger cities in Europe are much cleaner and safer than SF. More residents means city hall has more money to play with, which it can re-invest into schools, parks, the police, public transit and other things. Cheaper accomodation makes it easier to re-house homeless people and it makes homeless shelters more affordable for the city.
Bay area residents, Seattle residents, etc need to get over themselves and accept reality for what it is. They aren't protecting anything but their own sense of self-worth and the "theory" that bad things will happen if a 3 story apartment complex comes into the neighborhood.
The reality is, most of them want their property values insanely high, for when they are ready to sell and move to cheaper cities.
Just increasing housing density without solving transportation problems will result in a seriously changed lifestyle here, and that is what many people fear. Moreover, efforts to build better transportation in the bay area have been very ineffective. The light rail in Santa Clara County is a good example of this - it crawls through downtown San Jose, has very little ridership, and recovers only a small fraction of operating costs from fares. The jobs have almost always showed up in areas where there is an existing shortage of transit and housing - e.g., Sunnyvale, Cupertino, Mountain View, and Palo Alto. At this point the only feasible solution is to turn 101 and 85 into bus-only roads. No more single occupancy vehicles. Then let the market sort out how to provide transit for employers. That would be massively disruptive to existing lifestyles, but probably the only feasible way to increase transportation throughput in the face of increased housing density.
Most of the readership on hacker news is in the tech industry, but I think the biggest problem with housing in the bay area is for non-tech workers.
Income is extremely relative. Age, health, dependents, quality of life, location, expectations, etc etc. I had a fantastic quality of life on 10k/year many moons ago, for instance. But everything is always changing. I learned recently that the atoms that make up our bodies change in large quantities from moment to moment :-o
The “happiest man on earth” according to fmri studies led by the Dalai Lama at the Mind And Life Institute lives on $50/mo and donated all his money from book sales to helping the poor. Source: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000SEUSXW/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
The article doesn't talk about people not being able to afford housing, it talks about them renting in desirable areas rather than buying elsewhere. If anything, it's about a rent/buy price spread resulting from housing inventory being taken up by investors who prefer to own and rent out rather than sell, driving up purchase prices to a greater multiple of rent prices than would otherwise be the case. Which, if viewed as problematic, is not a problem that building more housing solves. You'd have to also make it less attractive to be a landlord.
More apartments, condos, and houses lead to more rental units, which lowers rents, which makes it less attractive to be a landlord.
There are many places throughout the south, midwest and northeast with decent job markets and dirt cheap housing. The mortgage on my 1800 sq foot house is nearly a third of the cost of my tiny one bedroom back in Seattle. The cost of the entire house is a tenth of a house in the Bay Area.
I am fortunate to work remotely but when deciding where to live I wanted to be able to afford to keep this roof over my families' head even if I didn't have a Bay Area/Seattle gig. I think the biggest obstacle may be coming up with enough cash to secure the financing in the first place, and for that I am grateful to have lived and worked in a tech hub.
2) Remove most of the coastal cities (SF, NYC, Boston, Seattle, Portland, etc. etc.)
3) End up with a list of metros with decent paying jobs and not exorbitantly expensive housing
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Plenty of machinists, auto mechanics, health care professionals and welders aren't gonna have much luck working from home.
I'm putting together a list of the best places to live for remote workers with families, hoping to turn it into a little website that you can filter by schools, available internet speeds, median house price, that sort of thing.
Hopefully it will help someone out there when there's more data.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1X2JihFpA97EEAMz8kD-j...
But that's really only available for a small subset of the population.
But you may be the only doctor around for 10s of miles. Which is why you'd be so valuable. I'm sure there are other $100k to $200k jobs that small towns need.
No, you won't get high-tech or programming in small-town America. But there's more to life than just the tech-field. Its easy to forget because we're mostly programmers in this website.
Part of the problem is these jobs don't have the sex appeal of SV tech so they aren't on people's radar or just not considered desirable because of the nature of manufacturing work.
A three hour commute is easier when you only do it twice a week, or a few times a month.
There's many places that have great ROIs but Palo Alto isn't one of them: they're dead last.
NIMBYism is going to absolutely choke the bay area over time, and newer generations of startups, VCs, and accelerators will wise up and broaden their horizons. The frequently parroted argument of "SF has the best pool of engineering talent" only goes so far.
Especially when quality engineers can move wherever they want, and Stanford and UC Berkeley aren't pumping out nearly enough CS grads to justify the absurd cost of operating for startups to stay there.
Less sarcastically: is there an index for this kind of thing? E.g. cost of living for an equivalent neighborhood plotted against median salaries for tech jobs?
There's a CompTIA "Tech Towns" report[1] from last year that does a good breakdown of salary + job opportunities vs CoL by city.
Anecdotally, I think it was right to rank Charlotte NC at the top. It's easy to find 100k+ salary jobs there if you have experience (avg is a bit lower though) - and median housing prices are like 230k. But the big downside is that you pretty much have to be cool with working for a bank.
[1] https://www.aitp.org/blog/aitp-blog/2018/10/23/tech-town-usa...
[0] Here's one: https://www.payscale.com/cost-of-living-calculator
I don't find SF to be any more expensive than any other "big" city outside of housing cost, especially when you factor in not needing a car to get around.
Of course, on $40k/year I suppose one would be taking subsidies or medicaid instead of paying full freight. But, then I guess it could be said you can make it in SF on $0/year...
> (No car, no drinking, cook during the week)
We have very different views of "very comfortably" living.
For reference, the amount you have remaining every month after paying rent is close to what I end up averaging on vacation! And I definitely don't think I live a very comfortable lifestyle. (My vacations aren't even that nice - we rent budget cars, fly max economy flights, almost always stay in the bottom 25% of AirBNBs in cost, and almost always eat at $-$$ restaurants) Compared to most Americans - clearly, I spend more on vacation. Compared to my SF Bay Area peers - I spend nothing.
Not if you're a contractor without a full-time employer. In college I did freelance work, and I lost nearly 30% to taxes despite making less than $5k a year from my work. Having your social security responsibility doubled is brutal.
But, if you're living solely off investments you don't pay those. I was surprised to see that capital gains tax is zero below a certain income. It seems rather unfair, since you can choose when to sell.
If you adjust your rates accordingly, it's a wash for everyone involved (this is one of many reasons the 1099 price per hour should be around twice the W2 price per hour).
None of this has anything to do with CA income tax.
Articles like this are starting to annoy me because I see the working poor and lower-middle class, who have very serious financial issues today lumped in with young professionals with 2010 levels of student debt trying to live the lifestyle of young professionals in the 1980s (who were largely free of student debt) to their own financial detriment.
If you have a household income of $110k and both work in SF, you are screwed. If you have a household income of $110k and live almost anywhere else in the country, you have options.
I've been interested in the subject for while, but do you know of any recommended reading material about what being a YP in the 80s was like (socially, career wise, etc) and the economics of how it was possible?
http://www.paulgraham.com/re.html suggests that young professionals being paid more was new around this time. I don't know if this is true or not. If it is true, then this would suggest that there was a sudden increase in disposable income among young professionals. Professionals were already a small fraction of workers, and social change is usually uneven, so it seems likely that in addition not all professional jobs experienced this shift at the same time.
If you suddenly give a small fraction of the population more money then they are likely to live it up because there aren't enough of them to drive the costs up in lock-step.
The problem is you're tied down to a location. The market is hot now, but even so, it is not trivial to list a house, get an offer, close, and decamp from it, and it's rare that that goes quickly. If you envision moving around from job to job, rather than settling in for the long haul, a 30-year mortgage is a ball and chain.
If you read the article, they mention "built to rent" houses. I bought one of these, and although I do not rent it out now, I could quite easily rent it out if a better opportunity comes along that would require me to move.
I think this is a good option for people who have the cash for a down payment, are looking for a place to live, and don't want to deal with rising rents in case they do stay, while still increasing net worth every month with the mortgage payment. You might be tied down for a year or two, but it's not like being stuck somewhere for 30 years if you have the option to rent a place out.
If you aren't in an area with very high housing costs (which, obviously, very many readers of this site are), it's not even that big a deal to sell your house when you need to. If your house constitutes 40% of your net worth, and you take a 5% hit on your sale price, then your net worth has declined... 2%. A good job is worth that.
Admittedly, it's different when your house is 90% of your net worth and you're barely able to afford your mortgage.
That's both the mother AND father working to bring home $59,039 on the average (before taxes and other costs).
Its clear you live in a rich area where $100k isn't much. But that's also why a large chunk of Americans think that "city-folk" are disconnected from reality. $100k is a lot for many people.
My sister lives in an area (in USA) where a 2-bedroom apartment is just $500/month, low crime good living conditions.
It doesn't change the fact that $100k is still a lot of money, but the people for whom that a lot a money aren't on some farm in the middle of the country, they're driving your uber, greeting you at the entrance to your apartment and delivering your instacart.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_Sta...
[2] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/newyorkcitynewy...
This isn't accurate. That's everyone in the household collectively working to bring home 59,039 on average. 27% of "households" are individuals. 34% of households are couples (that is to say, two people with no dependents. If they're mothers or fathers, they're empty nesters.) So only about a third of households have more than two people (presumably parents + children.)
Not sure what the median income for households with two working parents + children is.
Presumably, this is because the risk of losing income is higher (lack of job security) and or not as much opportunity to increase income.
You mean he doesn't live out in the sticks or a run-down city like Detroit (MI), Gary (IN), or Paterson (NJ). You don't need to live in a rich area for $100k to not be that much.
The fantasy of what people who don't earn 100k think 100k buys you is very different from the reality of what lifestyle 100k affords.
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