8 ms·

This analysis may be reasonable as far as it goes, but it can still make financial sense for someone to live and work in the Bay Area. I recently took a new job

This analysis may be reasonable as far as it goes, but it can still make financial sense for someone to live and work in the Bay Area. I recently took a new job near San Francisco paying ~$160k. Living cheaply, our actual consumption for my family of 3 is about ~50k a year. (Yes, this is possible -- and life can still be enjoyable if you like spending time in nature/other inexpensive activities.) After taxes, that leaves me $50-60k a year to invest/save for retirement. Compare that with a salary of $105k in inexpensive Salt Lake City, which is where my second-choice offer was. After taxes and consumption for a similar lifestyle, I'd be saving somewhere around $30-40k/year, a substantial decrease. Not to mention the fact that if the startup that made that offer went under, it would be much harder to find another interesting job with similar compensation in Salt Lake than San Francisco. I don't plan on living in the Bay Area long-term, but in the early stages of my career I can accumulate a lot more savings and also grow my skills faster by living here than probably anywhere else in the world.

segmondy 10y ago
What's your commute like? My friend that moved there who tries to convince me to move out there, has a 2hr one way commute. How many sq feet is your living space for you and your family?
- kcorbitt 10y ago
  My commute is a 15-minute walk, or 5-minute bike ride. :) I chose the apartment based on proximity to work -- could have saved $100-200/mo with a longer commute, but the savings would have been more than eaten up by the gas/car maintenance costs and I hate commuting. I still own a car, but don't use it to get to work. We live in a 680 sq ft one-bedroom apartment in an older development ($2200/mo). We'll have to upgrade when my baby outgrows his large walk-in closet, but it fits our needs fine for now.
  - deleted 10y ago
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  - CiPHPerCoder 10y ago
    > We live in a 680 sq ft one-bedroom apartment in an older development ($2200/mo). Whoa, that's almost double the estimated mortgage for the 5 bedroom houses with an acre of land my family has been looking at purchasing. I'll never move to the SF Bay Area. I encourage others not to, either. Get the companies there to open up to remote employees instead.
    - the_gastropod 10y ago
      Yes. Urban areas are typically more expensive than rural areas. Maybe if urban residents stopped subsidizing unsustainable rural living, this price gap would shrink.
      - frgtpsswrdlame 10y ago
        >Maybe if urban residents stopped subsidizing unsustainable rural living What do you mean?
        nothrabannosir 10y ago
        Tax deductibility of mortgage interest is essentially renters subsidising homeowners. Some countries in Europe do it, and the EU is not happy with it. I'm personally grateful they're shoving the repeal of this tax deductibility down the member nations' throats (very very controversial measure). Homeowners have a stranglehold on politics because renters don't vote enough :(
        ghaff 10y ago
        That may be true (although there are tax deductions for renting in some places). However, people own property in cities and rent outside of cities so I'm not sure how relevant it is to the subsidy comment. (Which presumably is some variant of the oil/cars/roads claim because cities can apparently somehow exist in isolation of everything surrounding them.)
        10y ago
  - edgyswingset 10y ago
    > We live in a 680 sq ft one-bedroom apartment in an older development ($2200/mo). We'll have to upgrade when my baby outgrows his large walk-in closet, but it fits our needs fine for now. And there's the kicker. In SLC you could afford a real house for that much. It's good that you can save that much right now, though. Definitely going to pay off.
    - emodendroket 10y ago
      Yeah, a lot of dollars-and-cents comparisons kind of ignore lifestyle concerns.
  - stuckagain 10y ago
    You don't have to go to Utah to beat that. My mortgage on a SFH in Oakland is $2350/mo, I have 1800 sq ft and a garage and a big yard.
    - sxates 10y ago
      When did you buy? I don't think you'd be able to achieve that today except in the shady parts of Oakland.
    - sgdread 10y ago
      Research Triangle Park area in North Carolina - 1800sqft, 2-car garage ~ $1410/mo. Salaries $100-140k
  - sotojuan 10y ago
    That's crazy. I pay $1,900 for a 800sqft in Brooklyn and I thought that was bad!
  - jly 10y ago
    > We live in a 680 sq ft one-bedroom apartment I am barely willing to live by myself in a space of this size, let alone with spouse and children. For those that are, the bay area presents an opportunity to save some of the large salaries being offered. For those that are not, it's a deal-breaker.
- luminiferous 10y ago
  Not OP, but I live 1.5 hours away from my job in south bay. I can stomach it for now but the commute is slowly killing me. Working in the Bay is really about balancing your rent with your willingness to commute. You can have a short commute if you're willing to live really close to your job, but those places (SF and/or south bay) tend to be very pricey. Although, south bay (Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale) is cheaper per sq ft. than SF since it's more suburban. It makes a lot of sense to get a job in south bay and get a house if you have a family. If you're younger and want to live somewhere more dense or cheaper, it's harder. If your job is in SF, you can live in Oakland/Berkeley (which is a good deal cheaper than SF), and as long as you and your job is near a BART station, your commute can be sub 30 minutes. Otherwise, you're out of luck, since it takes forever to get anywhere in the city by car/uber/bus. If your job is in south bay, the commute from Oakland/Berkeley is 1 hr+, approaching 2 hrs when traffic is really really bad. And you'll need a car or a corporate bus. You could also live in San Jose and take the train up, which is much faster, although I'm not so sure about the rent situation in San Jose. Last I checked, the rent was ~2.2-2.4k for a one-bedroom, which is actually about on par with both Oakland and south bay. Although for the same price in south bay or Fremont, you'll get more room, at the expense of living in a much more suburban area.
NotQuantum 10y ago
As a newly graduated Site Reliability Engineer who's working in the Bay Area. I'm living and working in Sunnyvale, my expenses are way lower than expected, I was able to get a house a 20 minute bike away from work. I get a free caltrain pass, so I really don't need a car. I think the "cost of living" adjustment here is unfair. Sure, living in SF proper can cost you upwards of 8k-9k a month but there are MUCH more reasonable apartments where most of the tech jobs are in the South Bay area.
- ghaff 10y ago
  Simple COL adjustment factors give you a baseline, but they don't really work reliably beyond straightforward apples-to-apples comparisons. It probably works pretty well for comparing house/condo and transportation choices between one suburban location and another where rents are modest and you need a car. But doing a naive COL comparison between, say, Manhattan and Columbus, Ohio just isn't going to capture the lifestyle differences and tradeoffs.
- vaishaksuresh 10y ago
  Do you have a family and rent your own place or do you share accommodation? That is a huge factor. I have single friends who pay $600 rent as opposed to me paying $3000.
- sthatipamala 10y ago
  I cannot even imagine what kind of lifestyle would result in spending 8K a month in SF. I live in SF spending 4K a month for 2 people
WhitneyLand 10y ago
That's a tough argument to make that SF beats SLC in net savings. You should try living with your family in a house with a backyard, it's quite enjoyable and could be pretty cheap over time if you see any appreciation. Secondly there are a lot more taxes on a lot more things in SF, are you factoring that in? Also I'd bet you are worth more than 105k in SLC if you looked around longer. I love SF and it's great to live there for many reasons, but I don't think "cheaper than utah" is one of them.
- jorblumesea 10y ago
  Same with Seattle. Houses going for 300-500k, Salaries 110k+, minimum. I really don't think it's true either for my region. If you love the startup world, hard to beat SF.
  - nojvek 10y ago
    Not much left in Seattle under 500k. The market is pushing the prices even higher.
    - jorblumesea 10y ago
      South Seattle, West Seattle and some parts of North Seattle are still fairly affordable, for an engineer at least.
- drstewart 10y ago
  >You should try living with your family in a house with a backyard, it's quite enjoyable and could be pretty cheap over time if you see any appreciation. You should try living in a cabin in the woods. Way cheaper plus you get fit from chopping up firewood for the winter. Obviously only a fool would live in a city in Utah when they could live in rural Alaska for cheaper!
  - Zelmor 10y ago
    Please leave. >>> 4chan is thataway
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Retric 10y ago
The problem with the analysis is 'similar lifestyle' when compound interest is your friend. Living in a much nicer apartment in SLC has minimal extra costs as the gap from a large 1BR to 2BR in SLC might only be ~250$/month. SF is a great place with dual income no kids. Less so 1 income and an infant. But, much worse when you have young kids. So, in just 3 years and possibly another kid, when it's going to be much harder to swing that tiny 1BR in SF without feeling really cramped.
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funkaster 10y ago
50k a year for a family of three? Sure, maybe if you are really, really frugal and live far south or east. But living in the city, you could barely pay rent + groceries with 50k a year for a family of three. We live relatively frugal and got a good deal for rent, but I'm pretty sure we are over 50k a year, even more now that we are a family of three and need to consider the outrageous prices of daycare. That last point is something I now miss a lot from my home country: professional (2+ years of technical/uni training) daycare at reasonable prices, even free depending on the area/your income. Edit: I just saw that you live in the city. The rest of the argument still holds though.
- kcorbitt 10y ago
  I live in San Bruno, not SF. I agree that it would probably be very difficult to have a decent quality of life at our spending level living in SF proper. But we're just an 18-minute BART ride away from downtown when we want to go in.
trimbo 10y ago
Beyond actual savings amounts, one thing that was pointed out to me recently is that travel costs the same for everyone. So if you like to travel, living in a high-cost/high-salary area can provide a major advantage for your endeavors.
sheepmullet 10y ago
> I don't plan on living in the Bay Area long-term And that is the key. If you were looking at living in the Bay Area long term it would be a different story. In SLC as a software engineer if you live reasonably frugally you can own a decent family home outright in under 7 years. For me that opens up a whole new level of freedom.
- kcorbitt 10y ago
  > If you were looking at living in the Bay Area long term it would be a different story. Agreed. > In SLC as a software engineer if you live reasonably frugally you can own a decent family home outright in under 7 years. Sure, and that's attractive. But by contrast, after 7 years here with a progressing career trajectory, I'd have enough money to buy a home in cash almost anywhere in the world. Given that we haven't decided where we want to settle down yet (I'm rather partial to Barcelona...) that cash is more valuable to me than a paid-off home in eg. Salt Lake. To repeat a theme that I think we can all agree on: these decisions are highly personal and include a lot of tradeoffs, and will naturally look different to different people even in nominally similar situations.
rubicon33 10y ago
I'm sorry but your situation sounds like it simply doesn't apply to the average SF engineer. For starters, your salary is about $30k more than the average SF salary. You managed to find a decent sized 1 bedroom that is FAR below market rate in SF (~3500 to your 2200). And although not as uncommon, it's still worth mentioning... You're married, and can share living expenses with another person. That means your already low rent of $2200 is even lower, compared to someone who might be single.
elastic_church 10y ago
> ...our actual consumption for my family of 3.. > I don't plan on living in the Bay Area long-term... Just my initial observations. I think these are incongruent
surfmike 10y ago
How much are your housing costs? Except for people who got in with rent control, I see very few apartments that cost less than $2500, and that's for a single bedroom.

segmondy 10y ago

What's your commute like? My friend that moved there who tries to convince me to move out there, has a 2hr one way commute. How many sq feet is your living space for you and your family?

kcorbitt 10y ago
My commute is a 15-minute walk, or 5-minute bike ride. :) I chose the apartment based on proximity to work -- could have saved $100-200/mo with a longer commute, but the savings would have been more than eaten up by the gas/car maintenance costs and I hate commuting. I still own a car, but don't use it to get to work. We live in a 680 sq ft one-bedroom apartment in an older development ($2200/mo). We'll have to upgrade when my baby outgrows his large walk-in closet, but it fits our needs fine for now.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- CiPHPerCoder 10y ago
  > We live in a 680 sq ft one-bedroom apartment in an older development ($2200/mo). Whoa, that's almost double the estimated mortgage for the 5 bedroom houses with an acre of land my family has been looking at purchasing. I'll never move to the SF Bay Area. I encourage others not to, either. Get the companies there to open up to remote employees instead.
  - the_gastropod 10y ago
    Yes. Urban areas are typically more expensive than rural areas. Maybe if urban residents stopped subsidizing unsustainable rural living, this price gap would shrink.
    - frgtpsswrdlame 10y ago
      >Maybe if urban residents stopped subsidizing unsustainable rural living What do you mean?
      - nothrabannosir 10y ago
        Tax deductibility of mortgage interest is essentially renters subsidising homeowners. Some countries in Europe do it, and the EU is not happy with it. I'm personally grateful they're shoving the repeal of this tax deductibility down the member nations' throats (very very controversial measure). Homeowners have a stranglehold on politics because renters don't vote enough :(
        ghaff 10y ago
        That may be true (although there are tax deductions for renting in some places). However, people own property in cities and rent outside of cities so I'm not sure how relevant it is to the subsidy comment. (Which presumably is some variant of the oil/cars/roads claim because cities can apparently somehow exist in isolation of everything surrounding them.)
        10y ago
- edgyswingset 10y ago
  > We live in a 680 sq ft one-bedroom apartment in an older development ($2200/mo). We'll have to upgrade when my baby outgrows his large walk-in closet, but it fits our needs fine for now. And there's the kicker. In SLC you could afford a real house for that much. It's good that you can save that much right now, though. Definitely going to pay off.
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    Yeah, a lot of dollars-and-cents comparisons kind of ignore lifestyle concerns.
- stuckagain 10y ago
  You don't have to go to Utah to beat that. My mortgage on a SFH in Oakland is $2350/mo, I have 1800 sq ft and a garage and a big yard.
  - sxates 10y ago
    When did you buy? I don't think you'd be able to achieve that today except in the shady parts of Oakland.
  - sgdread 10y ago
    Research Triangle Park area in North Carolina - 1800sqft, 2-car garage ~ $1410/mo. Salaries $100-140k
- sotojuan 10y ago
  That's crazy. I pay $1,900 for a 800sqft in Brooklyn and I thought that was bad!
- jly 10y ago
  > We live in a 680 sq ft one-bedroom apartment I am barely willing to live by myself in a space of this size, let alone with spouse and children. For those that are, the bay area presents an opportunity to save some of the large salaries being offered. For those that are not, it's a deal-breaker.
luminiferous 10y ago
Not OP, but I live 1.5 hours away from my job in south bay. I can stomach it for now but the commute is slowly killing me. Working in the Bay is really about balancing your rent with your willingness to commute. You can have a short commute if you're willing to live really close to your job, but those places (SF and/or south bay) tend to be very pricey. Although, south bay (Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale) is cheaper per sq ft. than SF since it's more suburban. It makes a lot of sense to get a job in south bay and get a house if you have a family. If you're younger and want to live somewhere more dense or cheaper, it's harder. If your job is in SF, you can live in Oakland/Berkeley (which is a good deal cheaper than SF), and as long as you and your job is near a BART station, your commute can be sub 30 minutes. Otherwise, you're out of luck, since it takes forever to get anywhere in the city by car/uber/bus. If your job is in south bay, the commute from Oakland/Berkeley is 1 hr+, approaching 2 hrs when traffic is really really bad. And you'll need a car or a corporate bus. You could also live in San Jose and take the train up, which is much faster, although I'm not so sure about the rent situation in San Jose. Last I checked, the rent was ~2.2-2.4k for a one-bedroom, which is actually about on par with both Oakland and south bay. Although for the same price in south bay or Fremont, you'll get more room, at the expense of living in a much more suburban area.

NotQuantum 10y ago

As a newly graduated Site Reliability Engineer who's working in the Bay Area. I'm living and working in Sunnyvale, my expenses are way lower than expected, I was able to get a house a 20 minute bike away from work. I get a free caltrain pass, so I really don't need a car. I think the "cost of living" adjustment here is unfair. Sure, living in SF proper can cost you upwards of 8k-9k a month but there are MUCH more reasonable apartments where most of the tech jobs are in the South Bay area.

ghaff 10y ago
Simple COL adjustment factors give you a baseline, but they don't really work reliably beyond straightforward apples-to-apples comparisons. It probably works pretty well for comparing house/condo and transportation choices between one suburban location and another where rents are modest and you need a car. But doing a naive COL comparison between, say, Manhattan and Columbus, Ohio just isn't going to capture the lifestyle differences and tradeoffs.
vaishaksuresh 10y ago
Do you have a family and rent your own place or do you share accommodation? That is a huge factor. I have single friends who pay $600 rent as opposed to me paying $3000.
sthatipamala 10y ago
I cannot even imagine what kind of lifestyle would result in spending 8K a month in SF. I live in SF spending 4K a month for 2 people

WhitneyLand 10y ago

That's a tough argument to make that SF beats SLC in net savings. You should try living with your family in a house with a backyard, it's quite enjoyable and could be pretty cheap over time if you see any appreciation. Secondly there are a lot more taxes on a lot more things in SF, are you factoring that in? Also I'd bet you are worth more than 105k in SLC if you looked around longer. I love SF and it's great to live there for many reasons, but I don't think "cheaper than utah" is one of them.

jorblumesea 10y ago
Same with Seattle. Houses going for 300-500k, Salaries 110k+, minimum. I really don't think it's true either for my region. If you love the startup world, hard to beat SF.
- nojvek 10y ago
  Not much left in Seattle under 500k. The market is pushing the prices even higher.
  - jorblumesea 10y ago
    South Seattle, West Seattle and some parts of North Seattle are still fairly affordable, for an engineer at least.
drstewart 10y ago
>You should try living with your family in a house with a backyard, it's quite enjoyable and could be pretty cheap over time if you see any appreciation. You should try living in a cabin in the woods. Way cheaper plus you get fit from chopping up firewood for the winter. Obviously only a fool would live in a city in Utah when they could live in rural Alaska for cheaper!
- Zelmor 10y ago
  Please leave. >>> 4chan is thataway

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Retric 10y ago

The problem with the analysis is 'similar lifestyle' when compound interest is your friend. Living in a much nicer apartment in SLC has minimal extra costs as the gap from a large 1BR to 2BR in SLC might only be ~250$/month. SF is a great place with dual income no kids. Less so 1 income and an infant. But, much worse when you have young kids. So, in just 3 years and possibly another kid, when it's going to be much harder to swing that tiny 1BR in SF without feeling really cramped.

deleted 10y ago

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funkaster 10y ago

50k a year for a family of three? Sure, maybe if you are really, really frugal and live far south or east. But living in the city, you could barely pay rent + groceries with 50k a year for a family of three. We live relatively frugal and got a good deal for rent, but I'm pretty sure we are over 50k a year, even more now that we are a family of three and need to consider the outrageous prices of daycare. That last point is something I now miss a lot from my home country: professional (2+ years of technical/uni training) daycare at reasonable prices, even free depending on the area/your income. Edit: I just saw that you live in the city. The rest of the argument still holds though.

kcorbitt 10y ago
I live in San Bruno, not SF. I agree that it would probably be very difficult to have a decent quality of life at our spending level living in SF proper. But we're just an 18-minute BART ride away from downtown when we want to go in.

trimbo 10y ago

Beyond actual savings amounts, one thing that was pointed out to me recently is that travel costs the same for everyone. So if you like to travel, living in a high-cost/high-salary area can provide a major advantage for your endeavors.

sheepmullet 10y ago

> I don't plan on living in the Bay Area long-term And that is the key. If you were looking at living in the Bay Area long term it would be a different story. In SLC as a software engineer if you live reasonably frugally you can own a decent family home outright in under 7 years. For me that opens up a whole new level of freedom.

kcorbitt 10y ago
> If you were looking at living in the Bay Area long term it would be a different story. Agreed. > In SLC as a software engineer if you live reasonably frugally you can own a decent family home outright in under 7 years. Sure, and that's attractive. But by contrast, after 7 years here with a progressing career trajectory, I'd have enough money to buy a home in cash almost anywhere in the world. Given that we haven't decided where we want to settle down yet (I'm rather partial to Barcelona...) that cash is more valuable to me than a paid-off home in eg. Salt Lake. To repeat a theme that I think we can all agree on: these decisions are highly personal and include a lot of tradeoffs, and will naturally look different to different people even in nominally similar situations.

rubicon33 10y ago

I'm sorry but your situation sounds like it simply doesn't apply to the average SF engineer. For starters, your salary is about $30k more than the average SF salary. You managed to find a decent sized 1 bedroom that is FAR below market rate in SF (~3500 to your 2200). And although not as uncommon, it's still worth mentioning... You're married, and can share living expenses with another person. That means your already low rent of $2200 is even lower, compared to someone who might be single.

elastic_church 10y ago

> ...our actual consumption for my family of 3.. > I don't plan on living in the Bay Area long-term... Just my initial observations. I think these are incongruent

surfmike 10y ago

How much are your housing costs? Except for people who got in with rent control, I see very few apartments that cost less than $2500, and that's for a single bedroom.