California teens are ditching office jobs – and making $100K before they turn 21
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Re: California teens are ditching office jobs – and making $100K before they turn 21
#2That's good for CS and CE related work. Too many people went there not because they liked programming or engineering but because they wanted to get rich fast.
Hopefully this means the clogged up job market will stop being the clown circus it is now.
Re: California teens are ditching office jobs – and making $100K before they turn 21
#3Can they afford a middle class lifestyle with just 100k? My understanding of costs of living in California puts people in that range in the working class with a very low rate of savings (no hope to escape into middle class even with compounding) or they could afford a small family and no savings.
Re: California teens are ditching office jobs – and making $100K before they turn 21
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Re: California teens are ditching office jobs – and making $100K before they turn 21
#5Can they afford a middle class lifestyle with just 100k? My understanding of costs of living in California puts people in that range in the working class with a very low rate of savings (no hope to escape into middle class even with compounding) or they could afford a small family and no savings.
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Re: California teens are ditching office jobs – and making $100K before they turn 21
#6Can they afford a middle class lifestyle with just 100k? My understanding of costs of living in California puts people in that range in the working class with a very low rate of savings (no hope to escape into middle class even with compounding) or they could afford a small family and no savings.
What does the alternative look like though? Sure tech companies pay engineers well, but there's plenty of other jobs requiring a college degree that don't reach that salary level.
Re: California teens are ditching office jobs – and making $100K before they turn 21
#7Can they afford a middle class lifestyle with just 100k? My understanding of costs of living in California puts people in that range in the working class with a very low rate of savings (no hope to escape into middle class even with compounding) or they could afford a small family and no savings.
Outside of the Bay Area, sure - California is a pretty big place, and trades are in demand all over.
Re: California teens are ditching office jobs – and making $100K before they turn 21
#8"AI" might be the given reason but I feel like this is an expected correction regardless. Ideally people would gravitate towards jobs that match their interests and talents. But our education systems, governments and economies have been pushing more people into thought work even if that's not where their talents lie. This has actually made a lot of the trades very lucrative for the few that remained. Of course, that won't last either, though.
The correction I'm waiting for is the one where we realise we don't need to work twice as many hours as they did a couple of generations ago. Somehow an entire generation was convinced that going to work for someone else was a privilege and working for yourself at home doing cooking, cleaning, maintenance etc was subjugation. A lot of people see the benefit of working for themselves now (they call it "hustling") but still fail to see what's right under their noses as they order the third takeaway of the week.
Re: California teens are ditching office jobs – and making $100K before they turn 21
#9Can they afford a middle class lifestyle with just 100k? My understanding of costs of living in California puts people in that range in the working class with a very low rate of savings (no hope to escape into middle class even with compounding) or they could afford a small family and no savings.
Let's run the numbers.
If I were an 18 year old financially savvy person making $100k a year in California, I would probably take home about $70k. About $1k, maybe $2k at the highest would be set aside for rent with roommates because I'm 18 and there's very little upside to me having my own apartment yet.
Groceries here in Finland are more expensive than I remember them ever being in the United States, and so based on my current budget I would set aside about $300 per month for food for myself. Maybe $400 if I wanted to go to restaurants more often. $500 is reasonable too. Over $1000 and you are deluding yourself or need to buy a rice cooker.
I'm still saving about $40,000 per yer, over half of my take home pay, conservatively. I'd consider that really good! What I do with that is my business, but on one extreme, if I threw all of that directly into my retirement fund, at a 7% real rate of return (reasonable given past index fund performance, already adjusted for inflation), I would have roughly $1 million in today's money by the time I'm 65.
But of course that's ignoring the real elephant in the room, which is that wages are famously sticky, and getting paid $100k by 18 is probably the single most surefire way to get paid $1 million by 30. The kinds of things and the kind of person you have to be to pull that off are where that price signal is coming from, and so I take away from this that, as is often the case in finance, these kids are probably not going to have to worry about that much money-wise even if they don't stick to a strictly calibrated plan.
Re: California teens are ditching office jobs – and making $100K before they turn 21
#10A dozen students