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No car payment, No credit card debt,
130k will let you live and eat with a bit of room to go do things once a month.
If you have a car payment and or credit cards kiss that once a month thing goodbye
150k will let you have a car and do things
Source : I left that area recently
Great, but please bear in mind that choice comes with real financial consequences to your lifestyle and you should not expect the state to bail you out of it.
For a family of 4. That's the critical bit left out of the article title. 104k is low income for a family of 4, in some areas. Which makes sense when it's hard to find somewhere to live alone, in SF, even at 100k. Finding a place big enough for a family of 4 plus all the costs related to 4 humans? Not surprising in the least.
Once upon a time, a family of four had the same number of working adults as a family of one.
I don't know much about SF salaries, but in NYC, 100K is really middle class. With enrage rent at 2k/mo, salaries have to be high in order to keep up with cost of living. Everyone makes a huge deal about the number but shouldn't it be more of a ratio? Like the cost of living to base salary? That should be a better statistic to judge quality of life.
After two years in San Francisco, I had to move back to my small(er) home town city because I ultimately realized there's little to no future for me in a city like San Francisco, despite making 250k/yr. I'd have to make at minimum $1M per year for a similar lifestyle (and even then, the stress of living in the bay area will reduce years from your lifespan... what's each year of your life worth to you?).
Interestingly similar discussion going around in the UK at the moment after a UK MP came out saying that '£70,000' salary makes you 'rich'. 70k as a single income won't get you a flat in London in any reasonable time and you'll most certainly be renting forever on that kind if money in London. Even if its triple the average UK wage. Location means everything.
Doesn't excuse them, but I can understand how they say such things.
Here in Boulder CO, the cutoff for "affordable" housing subsidies is ~80k for a family of four. 104k in the Bay Area seems about right.
Boulder managed to copy a lot of the good stuff about Silicon Valley - but also seems to have copied the brutal, rampant NIMBYism https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/04/business/how-anti-growth-... Great place, and I understand not wanting sprawl, but... build up and in?
Wow, this resonates with me. In 2013 my wife and I were living in the Bay Area and had just welcomed our third child into the family. I was making 105k/yr at Apple (which seemed like a ton at the time!) but I felt like I was saving very little of that. I was approached on LinkedIn to take a job with matching pay but that was fully remote. I could live anywhere I wanted in the entire country. I jumped at the chance an…
Just curious, as an engineer finding myself thinking along similar lines, where did you end up moving?
If anyone's up here visiting, I'll happily buy you a beer - or whatever you prefer, but... there's lots of beer here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just curious, as an engineer finding myself thinking along similar lines, where did you end up moving?
We moved to Utah where the tech scene is actually quite strong, and the cost of living is significantly less. We bought an 8k sq ft house for the price of many 1,500 sq ft town homes we had been putting offers in on in California. It can be such a rat race down there, it is refreshing to remember that it doesn't have to be that way. Life exists outside of The Valley, and it happens to be a pretty darn good one (and a…