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When one bedroom apartments cost $5,000 per month, you need a minimum salary of $200,000 to even qualify at the low end, but then over half your take home pay g
by seiji 11y ago
When one bedroom apartments cost $5,000 per month, you need a minimum salary of $200,000 to even qualify at the low end, but then over half your take home pay goes towards rent. A safer salary is easily $250k to $300k. Those levels of salary get you above the line of working just to pay for your overpriced apartment.
- delecti 11y agoI live in Seattle, as does the person who mentioned the salaries, and I would be hard pressed to even find a 1BR that cost $5,000/mo. I recently lived in a very large 2BR for $2200, full of amenities. Even if you want a really nice place in a great location I'd have no trouble finding a 1BR that was absolutely fantastic for $2000. This ain't SF.
- seiji 11y agodoh. It didn't occur to me people would stay in Seattle after getting Google jobs. Perhaps Google should COL-adjust SF employees up to about $500k/year. There's a weird life trap where you're making what most people would consider "a lot," but over half your take home pay is eaten by rent and food that costs 3x what it would somewhere else. So your "a lot" turns into "can't afford a car" or "can't save up enough to get out of the cycle" without moving to less desirable places. Better to serve in hell (SF/NYC) than reign in flyover country?
- jsolson 11y ago> It didn't occur to me people would stay in Seattle after getting Google jobs. It's actually pretty fantastic.
- aianus 11y agoFood in SF is cheap. So are car costs. Actually everything except rent was considerably cheaper when I lived in SF vs Toronto.
- mahyarm 11y agoBe glad you don't live in Vancouver, where the average house cost is the same as the bay area, but the average income is the same as reno nv. Rent although seems to be almost half the price of a house mortgage, so there is strange business going on in vancouver.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- toyg 11y agoIt might be that some companies offer near-SF salaries to make it a slam dunk for the new hire. From the point of view of a Valley giant, they probably churn higher-salaried people in SF/SV all the time, so one more located elsewhere is not a biggie. At 10% less it's still a win, and because of the differential from local prices, the new hire will be super excited to join and stick around, so why not? The more you push down towards average local salaries, the more you have to compete with local businesses and the more you risk getting average performance out of the hire, all for a relatively small cash saving.
- gopi 11y agoIt cost half that in most south bay cities. For $5k you can easily get a 2000 sq ft 4 bedroom independent home in most south bay towns (except palo alto, los altos etc)
- eitally 11y agoNote that a $5k/mo mortgage means a $1.2m+ selling price, for ~2000sqft. That's still insane (and doesn't include property tax, maintenance, utilities, or any of the other homeowner costs). Imho, anyone is crazy who thinks spending half their take home on a mortgage is acceptable.