4 ms·

I just put in some numbers and wow. Unless I'm missing something incredible my findings are kinda depressing. The top 5% salary in the UK is £81,000 -> after t

I just put in some numbers and wow. Unless I'm missing something incredible my findings are kinda depressing. The top 5% salary in the UK is £81,000 -> after tax is £54,817. £4568 a month. Say you spend £2k a month. That's £2568 for investments per month. Using the calc, it seems you would be able to retire at age 50. I quickly checked the US salary percentiles and the top 5th percentile of £81,000 in the UK is equal to the top 15th in the US. Thats 3x ceiling you could climb through not to mention taxes in the US are much much better? Am I crazy? https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-from-1-to-99-for-total-income-before-and-after-tax https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-f... https://www.thesalarycalculator.co.uk/salary.php https://www.thesalarycalculator.co.uk/salary.php https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-individual-income-percentiles/ https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-individual-income-perce...

scubakid 4y ago
It does seem like there are some pretty wild discrepancies in total comp between countries. If the distributed/remote trend continues progressing, I wonder if we'll see things start to equalize at all in our lifetimes, or if there are other geopolitical / macroeconomic / other factors that are more significant.
- d4mi3n 4y ago
  It should up to a point. A lot of high paying tech jobs are in regulated industries that sometimes have hard restrictions on who they're allowed to employ. For example, I know someone who works at Oracle Cloud and works on projects for the US DoD. For these projects Oracle is required to employ US citizens, perform background checks, and in some cases ensure those workers have clearance to work with classified information. I suspect there are other high paying jobs/markets with similar restrictions. It'll be interesting to see how the dust settles over the next few years as geographical location within a country and without impacts the labor market.
  - scubakid 4y ago
    It'll be interesting to see how quite a lot goes over the next few years, given recent events...
- teagoat 4y ago
  I would hope so. I don't think that place of birth, or ability to get a visa should determine salary. However, personal experience and friendship group makes me think that US tech salaries have only accelerated over the last couple of years. I went looking for some data to back up the idea to tech salaries have accelerated, but https://spectrum.ieee.org/engineer-salary https://spectrum.ieee.org/engineer-salary was the best I found, and was less dramatic than I expected.
  - murderfs 4y ago
    Tech salaries seem to be becoming increasingly bimodal: you can get $600k/year as a staff SWE at amazon/google/facebook if you get competing offers.
    - scubakid 4y ago
      For sure, seems bimodal or even trimodal from what I've read. I don't suppose those tier 1's ever accept fully built SaaS projects in lieu of the usual interview gauntlet? ;)
aidenn0 4y ago
> taxes in the US are much better This is complicated. Taxes in the US are different. For example, a lot of higher earners are concentrated in California and New York, which have fairly high taxes; in New York or San Francisco a single person making $105k would take home about $75k (slightly less in SF, slightly more in NY) or about £3k more. I would suspect (but do not know) that the UK government pension and health-care is at least slightly better than the US version. On top of that, people of a given income level spend more in the US (either because things are actually more expensive, or people in the US are more spendthrift; probably a bit of both), so if you come to spend like a typical American[1] your savings won't necessarily be higher in the US. Bay area rent, in particular is insane (rent alone would be more than the £2k a month you proposed for expenses, though $105k/year in the bay area would be a very low salary for a bay-area tech worker). Now, you can do better. I have a friend who works as a DBA in a very inexpensive part of the country; he makes more than the $105k per year. In fact his yearly salary is higher than what he paid for his house. When remote became normal during COVID a lot of people moved to cheaper parts of the country while keeping their high salaries. Also, everything else being equal, a higher top-line will always provide more opportunities for savings 1: Before you dismiss this completely, there are real social costs to spending less than your peer group. IMO they are worth it, but they should be factored into any planning you do.
- astrange 4y ago
  > For example, a lot of higher earners are concentrated in California and New York, which have fairly high taxes; in New York or San Francisco a single person making $105k would take home about $75k (slightly less in SF, slightly more in NY) or about £3k more. That's income taxes; states aren't that different when you actually count "taxes" ie property, sales, income, and whatever else is left over. Texas is theoretically a little worse for the middle class because property taxes are much higher. It's better if you're rich though.
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    > Texas is theoretically a little worse for the middle class because property taxes are much higher. It's better if you're rich though. I know they are higher in relative terms, but are they higher in absolute terms? I live in a single-family house in SoCal and pay over $12k/year in property taxes. [edit] absolute <-> relative

scubakid 4y ago

It does seem like there are some pretty wild discrepancies in total comp between countries. If the distributed/remote trend continues progressing, I wonder if we'll see things start to equalize at all in our lifetimes, or if there are other geopolitical / macroeconomic / other factors that are more significant.

d4mi3n 4y ago
It should up to a point. A lot of high paying tech jobs are in regulated industries that sometimes have hard restrictions on who they're allowed to employ. For example, I know someone who works at Oracle Cloud and works on projects for the US DoD. For these projects Oracle is required to employ US citizens, perform background checks, and in some cases ensure those workers have clearance to work with classified information. I suspect there are other high paying jobs/markets with similar restrictions. It'll be interesting to see how the dust settles over the next few years as geographical location within a country and without impacts the labor market.
- scubakid 4y ago
  It'll be interesting to see how quite a lot goes over the next few years, given recent events...
teagoat 4y ago
I would hope so. I don't think that place of birth, or ability to get a visa should determine salary. However, personal experience and friendship group makes me think that US tech salaries have only accelerated over the last couple of years. I went looking for some data to back up the idea to tech salaries have accelerated, but https://spectrum.ieee.org/engineer-salary https://spectrum.ieee.org/engineer-salary was the best I found, and was less dramatic than I expected.
- murderfs 4y ago
  Tech salaries seem to be becoming increasingly bimodal: you can get $600k/year as a staff SWE at amazon/google/facebook if you get competing offers.
  - scubakid 4y ago
    For sure, seems bimodal or even trimodal from what I've read. I don't suppose those tier 1's ever accept fully built SaaS projects in lieu of the usual interview gauntlet? ;)

aidenn0 4y ago

> taxes in the US are much better This is complicated. Taxes in the US are different. For example, a lot of higher earners are concentrated in California and New York, which have fairly high taxes; in New York or San Francisco a single person making $105k would take home about $75k (slightly less in SF, slightly more in NY) or about £3k more. I would suspect (but do not know) that the UK government pension and health-care is at least slightly better than the US version. On top of that, people of a given income level spend more in the US (either because things are actually more expensive, or people in the US are more spendthrift; probably a bit of both), so if you come to spend like a typical American[1] your savings won't necessarily be higher in the US. Bay area rent, in particular is insane (rent alone would be more than the £2k a month you proposed for expenses, though $105k/year in the bay area would be a very low salary for a bay-area tech worker). Now, you can do better. I have a friend who works as a DBA in a very inexpensive part of the country; he makes more than the $105k per year. In fact his yearly salary is higher than what he paid for his house. When remote became normal during COVID a lot of people moved to cheaper parts of the country while keeping their high salaries. Also, everything else being equal, a higher top-line will always provide more opportunities for savings 1: Before you dismiss this completely, there are real social costs to spending less than your peer group. IMO they are worth it, but they should be factored into any planning you do.

astrange 4y ago
> For example, a lot of higher earners are concentrated in California and New York, which have fairly high taxes; in New York or San Francisco a single person making $105k would take home about $75k (slightly less in SF, slightly more in NY) or about £3k more. That's income taxes; states aren't that different when you actually count "taxes" ie property, sales, income, and whatever else is left over. Texas is theoretically a little worse for the middle class because property taxes are much higher. It's better if you're rich though.
- aidenn0 4y ago
  > Texas is theoretically a little worse for the middle class because property taxes are much higher. It's better if you're rich though. I know they are higher in relative terms, but are they higher in absolute terms? I live in a single-family house in SoCal and pay over $12k/year in property taxes. [edit] absolute <-> relative