> You explicitly compared "property taxes and some incidental maintenance costs" to "rent" No, I explicitly contrasted them. Mortgage is rent. Rent is what you

> You explicitly compared "property taxes and some incidental maintenance costs" to "rent" No, I explicitly contrasted them. Mortgage is rent. Rent is what you have to pay if you haven't been able to acquire the assets of your own. If you had a high salary for a reasonable number of years, you would have your own money to work with. There would be no need to rent it. Taxes/maintenance is what you have to pay when you have assets. Even in the era of overpriced housing, a modest home is still only 1x-2x a typical tech salary. A small handful number of years working in tech and you don't need a mortgage. That's the point. Dropping down to minimum wage after that is very different to someone starting out life at minimum wage. The simple fact of the matter is that cost of living is dramatically lower when you are rich. > Mortgage is not property tax, and it's somewhat disingenuous to try to claim it should be considered an "incidental maintenance cost". I don't follow. Mortgage is on the rent side of the equation. It literally is rent. When you've had a high income for a reasonable amount of time, and didn't blow that high income on hookers and blow, you don't need to rent. You at that point have built up assets of your own. Thus, your only real housing costs are taxes and maintenance. I mean, you could have invested that money instead, but the equivalent investment income more than pays the mortgage, else you would have just paid the mortgage to realize the gains on that side, so for all practical purposes that cancels out. This possibility is ultimately moot. Squandering it all on hookers and blow is also a real possibility. This isn't a suggestion that every single person in tech is rich, because that is definitely not true, but we already addressed that in the original comment. The real takeaway here is that cost of living isn't a constant. Every person will experience cost of living differently, often very differently, and generally the richer you are the cheaper life gets. There are so many ways to save on or eliminate costs when you have assets to leverage. With that leverage, a low income can go quite far. Much, much further than it goes for someone without that leverage.