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- He had received an offer at a start-up, and he would have loved to take it, but it paid half as much, and he felt locked into a lifestyle that made this pay c

• uptown 8y ago
  What world are they living in where startups are paying $500-$600k?
  • dilyevsky 8y ago
    If “startup” means “pre IPO” then there quite a few places in town that go up to this for very senior roles.
    • eclipxe 8y ago
      Uber, Lyft, AirBnb....500k+ for Sr & Manager roles.
    • nemo44x 8y ago
      I think a lot of people here don't realize how lucrative the sales roles in tech companies are - if you're good at it. Top sales reps often make more than than top level managers. I estimate the top sales people are the highest compensated people in a company. It is true meritocracy, however. You are judged on a single metric more or less and the bottom of the group is dismissed without second thought. You can make a great living on the engineer side of the operation and it's steady but you'll never see the highs of the top sales people even when you're at a point with stock and salary being many hundreds of thousands. It's not a life for me but I have nothing but respect for the effort, time and relationship building great sales people put in. It's a hard, competitive ladder but if you make it work you'll hit high 6 figures and at times 7 figures for many years.
  • entee 8y ago
    Could be a sales gig, commission can push total comp quite high, particularly in enterprise sales gigs.
  • ransom1538 8y ago
    Sales. If you bring in 20million in accounts. A 1 million paycheck is just a write off.
• rwc 8y ago
  Not sure how you're interpreting the "good wife" but I interpreted her reaction as laughing at the notion they could afford to live on anything less than his current 1.2m salary.
  • ForHackernews 8y ago
    I believe OP is being sarcastic about "good wife".
    • arcaster 8y ago
      "good wife" as "what a bitch" or? Depending on how you interpret that, she could be a "good divorced wife" soon enough - although given marriage law in the U.S. you'd end up in the same 1/2 salary situation or divorced 1/4 salary situation lmao...
• dangwu 8y ago
  It’s not about living on 500k vs 1 million. It’s about much, much earlier retirement.
  • smacktoward 8y ago
    More likely it's about keeping up with the Joneses. If all your old school friends are making $5 million, it pains your status gland enough to "only" be making $1 million.
    • JackFr 8y ago
      The funny thing is when you move from making $1mm to $5mm you pick up a different set of friends to keep up with.
      • smacktoward 8y ago
        It's true, the coke dealers don't really hang around until you reach a certain income threshold.
  • minikites 8y ago
    I don't understand the mindset of burning yourself out in middle age so you can "enjoy the world" when you're much more likely to be frail and have serious health problems that prevent you from participating in many activities.
    • seveneightn9ne 8y ago
      If you make 1.2 million a year you could literally retire after 1-2 years and live comfortably (on ~40k) for the rest of your life. Want to live on 100k? Only takes 4 years.
      • eclipxe 8y ago
        Taxes.
• dudul 8y ago
  The way I read this part is that his wife laughed at how ridiculous the idea of taking a 50% pay cut was. I think that she was the one who couldn't imagine living with 600k instead of a million.
• naravara 8y ago
  >what world are these people living in that you can't give up a job that you hate because you can't afford to live on 500-600k. The one where you lock into a mortgage and a car that assumes a $1.2M salary to keep ahead of. It's really easy to let your lifestyle expenses balloon, especially in a high-COL city where minor increases in living space/amenities can end up costing large amounts of money.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • Alex3917 8y ago
    > where minor increases in living space/amenities can end up costing large amounts of money. It is pretty crazy how little extra money buys you. E.g. in NYC, the only differences between a $2,000 month apartment and a $20,000 a month apartment are going to be things like location, granite countertops, a well-designed bathroom, and better windows. But in most cases the actual floor space and layout is going to be almost identical. Clearly those things are worth something, but it's easy to see how the work and stress of paying for those accents is to result in a net negative happiness for many if not most people.
    • umanwizard 8y ago
      This is not true. $20,000/mo rent in NYC will get you a gigantic apartment (thousands of square feet), as you can verify on any housing listings website.
      • Alex3917 8y ago
        It can get you that, but not if you want to be in SoHo on the 30th floor of a luxury building or whatever.
        • ameister14 8y ago
          You are wrong. You'll pay $60-70 a square foot, but 20k will get you a lot. https://streeteasy.com/building/chelsea-modern/rental/2657434 https://streeteasy.com/building/chelsea-modern/rental/265743... https://streeteasy.com/building/336-west-23-street-manhattan/2 https://streeteasy.com/building/336-west-23-street-manhattan...
• eclipxe 8y ago
  >what world are these people living in that you can't give up a job that you hate because you can't afford to live on 500-600k. New York City
  • mrfredward 8y ago
    The median income for NYC is $57,000. Surely 10X what a typical person makes is enough for a family to get by, it's just not enough for the lifestyle they want. Source: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/newyorkcitynewyork/PST040217 https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/newyorkcitynewy...
    • SpicyLemonZest 8y ago
      Avoiding lifestyle inflation in the first place is definitely part of the puzzle, but it’s not clear that it can dig you out of the hole once you’re in it. Is giving up the lifestyle they want and have really going to make them happier?
      • kirkules 8y ago
        Is an answer of "yes" inconceivable?
    • leroy_masochist 8y ago
      You are correct, but if this guy's an HBS alum pulling in 7 figures on the buy side, then he and his family are living the Upper East Side lifestyle which means: Private school tuition - $50k/kid/year Additional activities such as tutoring, sports, etc - $10-20k/kid/year Mortgages+fees or rent for a 1,500 square foot apartment in a doorman building in East 80's - $75,000-150,000/year Mortgage or rent for country home in Hamptons or Litchfield County - $40,000-100,000/year Literally half of his income is going to be taxed as an NYC resident. So he's got $600k of cash flow and if he has 2 or 3 kids, the very basic fixed costs of housing and schooling are likely taking up about half of that. With the remaining half he has to pay for food, vacations, cars, clothing, etc, and anything left after that will get saved. To be clear, nobody is making this guy do this. Nobody's forcing him to "summer" anywhere, nobody's forcing him to enroll his daughters at Spence when PS 6 is free. But at the same time, this is a guy who came up through a system in which preppy affluence was the chosen lifestyle of his "me 10 years from now" role models. As easy as it is to mock the concept of anyone being "trapped" when they make 1.2mm a year, the truth is that stopping his current job would be profoundly disruptive and stressful for this guy, his wife and their kids. So I get where his wife is coming from when she laughs at his mention of the startup.
• onetimemanytime 8y ago
  Making $1.2 Mil and probably spending already even the future raises that may not come. Your lifestyle adjusts to your salary.
• toasterlovin 8y ago
  So this dovetails with what I think is the most fascinating topic in evolution: the demographic transition in humans. If you're not familiar, demographic transition is the term used to describe what has happened to the demography of nations as they become developed. Which is that, rather than producing more children with their material abundance, people in rich nations have less children. This is not, at all, what biology would predict. More resources should lead to more offspring. My personal hunch as to what causes the demographic transition is that we have an evolved system for determining whether we are doing well or doing poorly and that system calibrates itself by examining the people around us. But, because our current economic and social system sorts people by income and status (talented people migrated into the cities from farms, even more talented people moved into more expensive neighborhoods, etc.), and because advertising constantly shows us higher levels of consumption to aspire to, even people who are, in an absolute sense, raking in obscene amounts of money are surrounded by a peer group that are roughly at their level. So it never really feels like you're rich; even though you live in a $3 million dollar home, you live on a street with $8 million dollar homes; even though your kid goes to a $30k/year private school, you can't afford to spend $200k vacationing in France during the summer like some of their peers, etc. Interestingly, this parallels my own experience. As a senior developer, I'm now making roughly 3x what I made before becoming a programmer. Back then I would have imagined that all of my wants would be satisfied by 3xing my income. Yet somehow I still yearn to make more.
  • lotsofpulp 8y ago
    > and because advertising constantly shows us higher levels of consumption to aspire to, even people who are, in an absolute sense, raking in obscene amounts of money are surrounded by a peer group that are roughly at their level. Animals evolved using competition as a mechanism to select the best mates. Advertising is not the cause, it's the nature of all animals to project power. There might be some people here and there who are satisfied or whatnot, but even without advertising, people would be competing.
    • shredprez 8y ago
      This is a fair nit, but still: it's self-evident that modern advertising high-jacks natural competition and amplifies it in order to drive an unnatural level of spending (else companies could just skip advertising and see no change in revenue). tl;dr Not a root cause, but a powerful multiplier.
• justaguyhere 8y ago
  During the 2008-2010 crash, there were reports of many women leaving their wall street husbands when they lost their jobs. I still remember reading about one woman - one of her excuses were that she was no longer able to buy organic fruits (avocados or something) - apparently she only eats organic, and organic everything. That might be a small example, but it shows the way the wealthy lead their lives. Luxury cars, high end electronics, multiple homes ... they all add up.
  • swagasaurus-rex 8y ago
    Did those wives have any way to make the kind of money needed for their lifestyles themselves? After all, it's not like wealthy bachelors were common during the recession.
• eli_gottlieb 8y ago
  Let me guess: he lives in San Francisco? Ok, looks like it was actually New York, but under the same principle: golden handcuffs.
• JackFr 8y ago
  Let's say you've got three kids and you're living on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Your mortgage and maintenance for a 3 bedroom apartment at $3.5MM are going to be ~15000 a month or 180K a year. Three private school tuitions are 150K. Living in NYC you're paying NYC, NYS and Federal income taxes for probably the highest tax rate in the country. So basically it's easy to be paycheck to paycheck on 500K in NYC.
  • vasilipupkin 8y ago
    a problem easily solvable by a move to NJ, which of course, would dramatically increase your misery level. In fact, that's probably why that guy is miserable - he doesn't live in Manhattan and has a 2 hr or more commute every day.
    • kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
      There are plenty of wealthy people living a comfortable lifestyle in rich communities off the Palisades pkwy. with a 20 minute hop into the city. 15 if you drive at entitled speeds.
      • alexhutcheson 8y ago
        > with a 20 minute hop into the city. Maybe early on a Sunday morning? Or maybe if you're stopping the clock as soon as you get to the other side of the GWB? On a weekday morning, you'd be lucky if you can get from Secaucus to the Manhattan side of the Lincoln Tunnel in 30 min.
  • umanwizard 8y ago
    It's "easy" to squander almost any amount of money -- even Johnny Depp went broke. But just like Depp didn't have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on wine, nobody has to live on the UES and send their kids to 50k/yr schools.
    • tannhauser23 8y ago
• projectramo 8y ago
  I bet its mostly taxes and real estate. City + State + Federal taxes are around 50%. So $600k. Private School per kid is $50k. Assume two kids so about $100k. Okay, now a 4 bedroom apartment in NYC is like $25k/month (on Zillow, eyeballing it), or about $300k/year. You're down to $100k-$200k for food, vacations, clothes, cars etc.
  • scarmig 8y ago
    > You're down to $100k-$200k for food, vacations, clothes, cars etc. Oh, the humanity.
    • projectramo 8y ago
      You're doing fine, but at $600k, you'd be taking home $300k, and then its all going on rent unless you downsize drastically and move out of private school etc. I'm just explaining why the move would feel tough for a family.
• throwaway-1283 8y ago
  Take home pay in NYC on a $500k salary is ~285k/year or $23.75k/month. If you are supporting a family, then rent + living expenses + tuition + retirement + college savings etc will eat most of that easily.
• ChuckMcM 8y ago
  Contained in that question is a really interesting bit of learning. There are many ways to go through your career and your 'wealth' cycle. What worked for me was that when ever I got a raise or "extra" money (bonus, stock vesting, etc) I always adjusted my savings rate so that my take home pay was unchanged relative to inflation. The company gave me a 10% raise and inflation was 3%? I added 7% of that raise to my savings rate. As a result, my savings grew and my lifestyle didn't change, I could always "live on" a much more modest salary than I was being paid. That gave me tremendous flexibility in being able to take jobs that had a 'pay cut' but had other aspects that made them desirable (learning something new, opportunities to develop a new skill, more fun, Etc.) And after a while the amount of money your "savings" is kicking off gets to be more and more significant. If you're lucky, then one day the number your savings is kicking off is the same amount you're paying yourself out of your own paycheck and then you can walk away at anytime, keep your life style, and never have to work again. That gives you a tremendous amount of flexibility in how you spend your time.
• vitaflo 8y ago
  >what world are these people living in that you can't give up a job that you hate because you can't afford to live on 500-600k. The same one where a dev making $160k can't give up a job they hate because they can't afford to take a job paying $80k. Everything is relative. To many Americans and $80k desk job is the lap of luxury. To many devs, that pay would be insulting.
• majani 8y ago
  In my experience, for men it's usually some combination of women, children, addictive substances and "stunting" that finds guys in that situation.