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In Bay Area, six-figure salaries are “low income”

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Re: In Bay Area, six-figure salaries are “low income”

#281

Post by chaostheory »

phkahler wrote: post #227
geebee wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask you about one thing, though? Both my kids are in SFUSD schools, and San Francisco actually has a large number of 10/10 rated schools. This is based on test scores, of course, so it doesn't tell the whole story. For instance, take a look at this: http://www.greatschools.org/california/san-francisco/schools... Do you think that your elementary school in Colorado are vastly better than the top three we see her…

>> San Francisco actually has a large number of 10/10 rated schools. Is that on a national or state scale? I find my district in Michigan making all kinds of claims like that about many of our schools, but it's all compared to others in the state. Nationally we're still above average but nothing to get excited about.

I could be wrong but that's only a system that compares schools in CA with other schools in CA. It's currently being revamped so it may change.

Re: In Bay Area, six-figure salaries are “low income”

#282

Post by mightykan »

archeantus wrote: post #20
gshulegaard wrote: post #14

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…

I lived in Salt Lake City, Utah for 11 years. Needless to say, I got out five years ago the first chance I got. If you’re not into winter sports, the weather is shit. You get 10 months of bitter cold and snow every day. You have to dig your car out of the snow all winter and drive on horrible conditions with clueless drivers who seem to forget how to drive in snow every year. Spring and fall are one or so week each and you get rain storms the whole time. Then you have 6 or so weeks of scorching hot summer where it’s unbearable to be outside.

I never ventured outside of the metro area and no one was ever overtly racist but boy if you are not a white Mormon you will stick out, you will be judged and questioned. Most Utah Mormons are conditioned to be nice so on the surface they appear so but they do judge and single out people who don’t belong.

I visited SF over a weekend and was instantly surprised about how accepting everyone was. It just seemed like I fit in and belonged. I’d tolerate much worse conditions than “low income in SF” than be “rich” in Utah.

Re: In Bay Area, six-figure salaries are “low income”

#283

Post by rm_-rf_slash »

froindt wrote: post #273
sideband wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also moved from the the Bay Area to Oviedo, FL not long ago (fun fact about our little town: Brian Acton, co-founder of WhatsApp, grew up here). I agree with everything on your list, and I'll add one more item: 9) Greater thought diversity and tolerance for opposing viewpoints. When I lived in the Bay Area it seemed that too many people I interacted with were of similar backgrounds: very educated, high income and s…

> When I lived in the Bay Area it seemed that too many people I interacted with were of similar backgrounds: very educated, high income and similar political and social values. I think this is one of the most important things as a whole. I am in Iowa (a red except for the counties holding the ~5 largest cities) and have a friend who is in DC. She said she mentioned having a couple friends from high school who were co…

OT politics and viewpoints are deeply ingrained. Two people with different views could be given the exact same facts and come away with vastly different conclusions. That never changes. The way we with with people we disagree with does change, and it indeed changes us as well.

Re: In Bay Area, six-figure salaries are “low income”

#284

Post by nommm-nommm »

stevenwoo wrote: post #112
wehadfun wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have mixed feelings about this. People say that state shouldn't have to pay for your kids, but the state can send your kids to war. If the state sends your kids to war and they get killed who reimburses the parent for $100K they invested in the kid?

it looks like the default death benefit for the US Army serviceman or woman is $100K. http://myarmybenefits.us.army.mil/Home/Benefit_Library/Feder... There were additional sums added for those who died in the Iraq War, with a range from 250K to 800K that varied depending upon the rank and dependent family members. http://articles.latimes.com/2003/apr/05/news/war-benefits5

There's much more than just the one-time death benefit. On top of that SGLI (servicemember group life insurance) has a maximum payout of $400,000 and surviving spouses get ongoing payments and other benefits as long as they remain unmarried.

Re: In Bay Area, six-figure salaries are “low income”

#285

Post by bermanoid »

xweb wrote: post #89
ryanSrich wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just remember that you'll want to select a city that has a decent economy and tech scene in the event that you lose your job and need to take a location dictated position. So long as you and your partner are both making 6 figures you should be able to afford any of the following cities: - Seattle - Portland - Austin - Denver

I would strike Seattle from this list. Just over the last couple of years, home prices are up 50% or more. It's not SF/SV prices but it's 80-90% there...unfortunately. It is, however, easier to build in Washington, so hopefully this will be a bubble and not a permanent trend.

I wouldn't get too comfortable with the "easier to build" bit, either - Seattle has a strong far-left presence, and as we've seen in SF it's very easy for homeowners to convince them (against all reason) that more housing means higher prices and get them to start blocking new construction across the board (whoever thought up the "100% affordable or not at all!" bit is a genius at playing progressives like a fiddle, and is probably making a killing on a ton of SF property). Meanwhile, the office buildings that are actually luring more people to the city and driving prices up keep getting built, because they're not in the neighborhoods that NIMBYs care about.

Re: In Bay Area, six-figure salaries are “low income”

#286

Post by froindt »

120bits wrote: post #60

I moved out of California 5 years ago and I think I won't consider back moving back at all. I enjoy my 1K/month 2 bedroom-2 bath apartment. 15 mins commute to work and a decent pay to manage my monthly expenses. I dont get paid in 6 figures, but close and I still leave a pretty decent life. I have a friend who works for vmware and gets paid in 6 figures, and still complains about how hard is to manage and do budgetin…

What city/area did you move to? That sounds like midwest level affordability.

Re: In Bay Area, six-figure salaries are “low income”

#287

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

ryanSrich wrote: post #113
santaclaus wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Portland Rents in Portland are skyrocketing (I had friends whose landlords were pulling out 30% rent increases). I went from Portland to Oakland and my rent isn't that much more.

You can still buy a house in Portland for $500k. I live here. Bought in 2015. It's more expensive in 2017, but not 100% more. Once 1000sqft houses hit a $1mm average Portland will be too expensive. Until then we're doing just fine.

As a point of reference, you can buy a new 3,000+ sq ft house on 5+ acres of land just 30 minutes outside Minneapolis for that!

Not impressed.

Re: In Bay Area, six-figure salaries are “low income”

#288

Post by amyjess »

bardworx wrote: post #5

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.

Not too long ago, I built a tool that aggregates various information form the US Census, American Community Survey, and a few other sources.

At one point, I decided that I wanted to track the cost of living of every place, so I started delving into American Community Survey data to find what I needed. I wound up picking three variables to display: median annual income, median monthly housing cost, and median housing cost as a percentage of income.

I had to aggregate a bunch of stuff together for this, as the data was divided up between renters, owners with a mortgage, and owners without a mortgage.

Here's the query I made against the ACS API to pull the data I needed: http://api.census.gov/data/2015/acs5?get=NAME%2CB25106_001E%...

For the purposes of this post, I'll call the pieces of data this gives me by the following names (I don't remember if this is in the same order the API call returns... I'm copying and pasting this from notes I took when I was coming up with my calculations):

housingunits

renters

owners

ownersmortgage

ownersnomortgage

grent

smocmortgage

smocnomortgage

annualincome

First five variables are totals, the next four are all median values. SMOC stands for "selected monthly ownership costs", which is basically mortgage (if applicable) + property taxes + average utility payment. Grent stands for "gross rent" and is rent + average utility payment.

I then can do the following intermediate calculations:

rentpct = renters / housingunits

ownerpct = owners / housingunits

mortgagepct = ownersmortgage / owners

nomortgagepct = ownersnomortgage / owners

monthlyincome = annualincome / 12

And get the data points that will be displayed on the model's UI:

housingcost = grent * rentpct + (smocmortgage * mortgagepct + smocnomortgage * nomortgagepct) * ownerpct

housingcostapi = housingcost / monthlyincome

("api" here stands for "as percentage of income", and the acronym is used heavily within the American Community Survey's documentation of their income data, so I picked it up as wlel)

(and I'm displaying annualincome as well, which is just raw data from the ACS and not a calculation)

I've found that nicer places tend to have a lower housingcostapi, but within a narrow range. A wealthy suburb might be around 20%, while the ghetto might be around 30%. But there are tons of exceptions... middle-class suburbs tend to run a really wide gamut all over the 20s, so I wouldn't consider things like "20% housingcostapi = filthy rich people" to be gospel.

I'm not comfortable linking my census tool here because I've yet to set up safeguards to prevent my server from getting hammered by crawlers (my tool has a very large amount of dynamically-generated graphics that are CPU intensive to generate and are then cached... and there are so many possible permutations that a crawler could easily exhaust my disk space), but I might consider sending the link privately to people if I think they won't share it publicly.

Re: In Bay Area, six-figure salaries are “low income”

#289

Post by mklim »

sideband wrote: post #241
ransom1538 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did the exact same thing this year. Moved to Oviedo, FL from SF: 1) no state income tax, 2) public schools in my neighborhood are equivalent to a private school in sf [i] 4) weather is great 8 months out of year, 5) beaches you can swim in, 6) rent is ~1/4 of what it was in SF, 7) cuban food, 8) as a resident, kids have year round disney passes [i] http://school-ratings.com/Florida/schools/Carillon_Elementar... WARNI…

I also moved from the the Bay Area to Oviedo, FL not long ago (fun fact about our little town: Brian Acton, co-founder of WhatsApp, grew up here). I agree with everything on your list, and I'll add one more item: 9) Greater thought diversity and tolerance for opposing viewpoints. When I lived in the Bay Area it seemed that too many people I interacted with were of similar backgrounds: very educated, high income and s…

Agree in a lot of ways, but there's darker sides to this pro depending on context and who you are. One of the things that makes the Bay Area priceless to me (visibile minority) is that I'm consistently treated like a regular person/with friendliness by strangers instead of with general hostility/coldness like I was back home in the Midwest.

Re: In Bay Area, six-figure salaries are “low income”

#290

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

amyjess wrote: post #244
archeantus wrote: post #6

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…

I'm a Texan looking to move out of state because I'm transgender and our legislature wants to make it impossible for people like me to exist. Since that's the only reason I'm wanting to move, I'm looking for the most Texas-like place I can find. Unfortunately, the closest I can come is Southern California. I dragged my heels like crazy on admitting that SoCal was the only place that has most of what I wanted because…

must be in the Sun Belt

I'd try to sell you on Minnesota except for this :-)

Well, we do get tons of sun (similar solar insolation numbers to Houston, TX), but it can be bright and sunny and still -25F

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