6 ms·
Most of the time it's usually worth living in a higher cost-of-living area for better pay. If you make $100k and spend $20k on rent and expenses, you have $80k
by arjie 10y ago
Most of the time it's usually worth living in a higher cost-of-living area for better pay. If you make $100k and spend $20k on rent and expenses, you have $80k left over. If you make $150k (50% more) but double your expenses, you have $110k left over. Your savings/retirement grow more rapidly.
Personally, I love the geography in the Bay, but the money argument works out too. Especially when it comes to things that are practically fixed cost relative to where you live, like flying (often cheaper from big cities) or travelling, or many consumer goods.
- dyarosla 10y ago"80k left over". Someone's forgetting about taxes
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- jkestner 10y agoAnother plus to Texas. No income tax. The property tax is considerably higher, but it's more than offset by home prices.
- muzz 10y agoWhich is dwarfed by home price appreciation in the Bay Area. I guess that is the elephant in the room
- arjie 10y agoPost-tax income. Income tax varies from 0 in WA to considerably more in CA. It's large enough to be worth taking into account when ballparking.
- seanp2k2 10y agoThis is how I always explain it to people. I pay 4x rent but make 5.5x as much as my previous living + working situation in a different state from 4 years ago. There is a LOT more left over.
- hibikir 10y agoExcept that for tech workers, the bay is still insane expensive and it does not pay better. I am a senior dev. My last job in St Louis paid 220k. That means you can buy a 4 bedroom house EVERY YEAR. Expenses are far more than double in the bay. Pay is barely any higher in Top employers... Plenty of senior devs in the bay work for 160k plus options that they might or might not be worth anything, and that they will not be able to afford to buy if they leave, and might not see a liquidity event in 5 years. So they get paid LESS and the job is only worth it if they chain themselves to an employer. Netflix offers a better deal... But then welcome to Netflix's culture. The money argument just does not work at the top end. My current employer is based in the bay, but a large percentage of the senior talent is remote, precisely because the bay is a really shitty deal for what most tech companies pay. Just look at mortgages: the difference is not 2x, it's 5x. California taxes are huge. I did the math. For me, it's not even close, and that's assuming Netflix compensation.
- vasilipupkin 10y agoForgive me, don't mean to offend you, but there is a reason a house in St Louis costs 200k. When they needed a dystopian city scape for "Escape From NY", they didn't even have to build it, they simply filmed in St Louis. It's just, objectively speaking, not as nice a place to live as Bay Area. Just to put it in perspective, in nice parts of Chicago area, which is much more like St Loius than it is like SF, a house can easily cost anywhere between 600k and several million.
- argonaut 10y agoYour numbers are way off. Fresh grads (Bachelors degree) working at Google/Facebook are now making > $160k total compensation.
- morgante 10y ago> My last job in St Louis paid 220k. You're definitely an outlier. Every time I've done salary comparisons, SV vastly exceeds every other area especially at the upper end. For most other metros, you have only a handful of employers who are even willing to consider paying a developer >$180k. In SV, you can get competitive auctions going >$300k.
- bogomipz 10y agoYou definitely don't have anywhere near that left over unless you somehow don't pay your taxes.
- arjie 10y agoFeel free to consider the numbers to be post-tax if it helps you understand the point.