Could I posit for a moment that if you're not right out of school taking your first job that you should not accept an engineering position (making an assumption

Could I posit for a moment that if you're not right out of school taking your first job that you should not accept an engineering position (making an assumption here) at Amazon in Seattle for 130k? If you have experience that number is way too low, even if it's only the base salary. Add 30k to that number, then add in the value of your RSUs that will be liquifiable after 1-3 years, and suddenly your argument stops holding water from a purely economic perspective. Also, consider what happens to your asset value when your 150k home in Topeka grows at the normal rate there vs a 700k home growing at the rate home values are in Seattle. You could build a very nice amount of equity in the expensive market, sell it and then buy a gigantic/perfect/<insert your reqs here> house back in Topeka in cash and have no mortgage. These markets (Seattle, SF, Denver, ect.) have their appeal even if you don't care about the city life or mountains or whatever.