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You won’t, because you were smart and rented instead. :)
by hshehehjdjdjd 8y ago
You won’t, because you were smart and rented instead. :)
- kevin_thibedeau 8y agoIf you were smarter you'd have commuted in from the suburbs and banked the money for retirement.
- ido 8y agoIn SF the suburbs are called Silicon Valley and are also expensive.
- daveFNbuck 8y agoThere are also suburbs across the bay that are cheaper.
- ben_w 8y agoSufficiently expensive that when I consider Silicon Valley jobs in my future, I also consider getting a pilot license and commuting by plane from the central valley.
- Swizec 8y agoThat’s 2+ hours per day of your life that you’re never getting back. You can always make more money, but time lost is gone forever. How much is 2x5x52 = 520 hours worth to you? If you’re selling your time for even just $100/hour that’s $52,000/year right there. With a 300k salary your hour is worth way more than $100. For your family, it’s priceless.
- isostatic 8y ago300k a year post tax, 50 weeks a year, 50 hours a week, that's $120 an hour. If it takes an extra hour a day and $500 a month that's $3000 to save a month in housing costs
- Swizec 8y agoDon’t forget to take transportation cost out of your $3000 per month. I live across the street from the office and yes the rent is stupid, but my commute is a 5 minute walk. And rent is still stupid in a 30min radius (for a total of 1h/day). You really have to go 1h+ radius to make a significant dent in rent around here (SF).
- isostatic 8y agoI did - $500 a month. I have no idea what communitng costs, and little idea about rent. I have a 5 second commute from the bedroom to the office (3 minutes if I go downstairs and boil the kettle first), far easier. Monthly Mortgage is less than the weekly rent that one colleague pays in London, and he still has a 45 minute commute each way.
- kamaal 8y agoIf you are working for somebody else, you can't exactly make any extra money by working extra hours. At least in a programmers case. The only real thing to gain in this case is convenience.
- gsich 8y agoIt's essentially unpaid work. So you "upgrade" your 40 hour week to a 50 hour week.
- iainmerrick 8y agoIf you commute by train it’s not all necessarily wasted time. You can read, play games, listen to podcasts, etc. I always read many more books when I commuted than when I didn’t commute. I find myself making new year’s resolutions to read more. But it was easy when I had the commute as a forcing function. (Not having internet on the subway probably helped...)
- Swizec 8y agoIf you don’t think reading books is valuable enough to do when you aren’t commuting, is it really valuable to you? Or are you just doing the best you can to salvage a shitty situation? (I audiobook when running so I’m no better)
- iainmerrick 8y agoI think it is valuable, I’m just bad at organising and prioritising my spare time!
- murph-almighty 8y agoI always find other more pertinent/alarming things I need to do at home and the forced lack of internet makes me focus more than I normally would. Admittedly this doesn't say great things about my attention span...
- seattle_spring 8y agoSpending your day commuting and living in a car dependent hell hole is smarter, just because you can retire a bit sooner? What alternative universe has HN transformed into?
- kevin_thibedeau 8y agoFor NYC it can be an easy 30-45 minute train ride where you are free to occupy your time with something productive.
- AstralStorm 8y agoSomething productive that can be done in a car or train you mean. Not, say: - Being with your kids, spouse or helping them out to school or work - Housekeeping - Working out - Doing anything that requires undisturbed attention
- throwawaymath 8y agoTo your last point: in NYC it's pretty easy to do things requiring "undisturbed attention" on a 45 minute express Metro North train into the city from the suburbs. It's a very different experience from the subway. As for the other three, I guess I could say that I'm not sure it's realistic to try and budget your time so efficiently that a 30-45 minute commute is intolerable. Many people have commutes for which that's a margin of error on how long it will take them - that sounds like a real problem. Aside from working from home full time, what kind of commute are you looking to have, and at what distance from work? It's not realistic for most people to achieve a 15 minute commute, so 30-45 in a train really isn't that bad. If it really matters then you could do things on the train that would normally keep you from your spouse or kids at home :)
- murph-almighty 8y agoI'm one of those 30-45 minute margin-of-error folks- I'd move into Hoboken or Brookyln for a 45 minute commute in two seconds!
- shados 8y agoMaybe. Right now though, my 401k has been doing 15-18% for the last couple of years. My condo has been going up in value by about 13%/year, but I put 20% down and I think I'm at 30-35% equity, and my monthlies are cheaper than an equivalent rental. The rent + invest vs buy + bank on property value debate is age old, and I won't restart it here, but so far, I'm not doing terrible.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoWoah, when did renting became the smart choice?
- NegativeLatency 8y agoWhen it became the only choice
- arcticbull 8y agoThere's a great writeup on this -- I may have even seen it here [1]. On average house prices tend to keep up with inflation and trail the market across the US. In specific markets that may not be true, then there's all your expenses. Ultimately, it depends on your personal situation if you should buy or rent, and the New York Times has a great calculator [2]. tl;dr: It's not always the smart choice to buy. Or to rent. [1] https://affordanything.com/is-renting-better-than-buying-should-i-rent-or-buy/ https://affordanything.com/is-renting-better-than-buying-sho... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-calculator.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-cal...
- a008t 8y agoAs a thought experiment, imagine that you could rent a million dollar house for 1$/year. Then renting is obviously the smart thing to do. So rental yields are an important factor, as are your expectations of house price growth, opportunity costs etc. But if rental yields are low (as they are now) and you do not expect house prices to rise at a fast rate in the future, renting can easily be the smart choice. Regarding future house price increases. It seems to me that house prices can be approximated as a function of rents, interest rates (determining required return on owning a house), and anticipated growth in house prices (which again can be decomposed into growth in rents, reduction in interest rates and 'irrational' growth). Using London as an example. Rental yields appear to be around 3.5% in London at the moment, which suggests to me that a good deal of anticipated growth is priced in. But where can that growth come from? Rents are a function of incomes and are unlikely to outpace inflation. Interest rates seem to be more likely to go up than down. So it seems that house prices are unlikely to rise, and once that is realized by the market, prices may even come down as participants stop anticipating growth just because "London house prices always go up". House prices going up faster than rents in recent decades can probably be explained by interest rates being in a downward trend over the same decades. Now we seem to be in at least somewhat of a bubble due to irrational future growth expectations.
- mylons 8y agohaha, but what if it doesn't pop and we see something like Japan's economy from the early 90's on? High prices that never come down, combined with wage stagnation? We're kind of already seeing it now.
- vkou 8y agoYou can then move to a flyover state in the mid-west, and buy a palace for the $100,000/year you were stashing away.
- gnarbarian 8y agoThis is the future. Silicon valley rent problems are a network optimization problem best solved by pushing resources to the edge of the graph.
- Clubber 8y agoYa it has to be. We have so many square miles of underutilized cheap land between the costs it's crazy. The federal government owns around 60-90% of the land in the western states too. If only there was a way to communicate without being face to face.
- 0x445442 8y agoEspecially with the type of technical work that's so predominate on the west coast. A lot of that work could be moved to cheaper interior parts of the country.
- vkou 8y agoYet for some reason tech giants insist on building more opulent, centralized megaoffices in unaffordable areas. Perhaps it is because they do not bear the brunt of these costs.
- nradov 8y agoOne reason is that the executives who make the decisions on office locations can easily afford to live nearby. And most of them prefer to live in fashionable areas.