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Finally, if you’re looking to maximize your paycheck, consider moving to the San Francisco Bay Area, where the average salary is $107,798, the highest in the

• throwaway1979 14y ago
  It is shocking how often people don't consider this. I myself did not understand the full implications of cost of living until I moved several jobs, to different cities, each time my cost of living went up. At one point I realized, I was getting paid four times more in real terms but my standard of living was worse than in grad school!
• praptak 14y ago
  Wait, this dumbass page just divides the salary by the cost of living ratio? This is idiotic. It would only make sense if you spent all you salary on "livings", trying to maximize the monthly number of "livings" you get. What matters is the amount of cash you're left with after you pay the actual cost of living. In this model, 20k/y raise is a 20k/y raise wherever you live, assuming you've already got the monthly balance positive. Of course it's still not the perfect metric but still much better than this bullshit.
  • ImprovedSilence 14y ago
    I couldn't agree more. Also, I don't know how many times I've heard potential employers who are very interested in me, tell me "well the cost of living is so much less out here, we don't want to pay you jack $h!t!". As if I don't understand how compounding my raise percentage works over the course of my career, or they think my rent is going be drastically different... It's disturbing to think they can get away with it.
    • thesis 14y ago
      Low balling potential hires due to cost of living isn't right and won't win you any hires... but.. It's disturbing to think that you'd pay the same, or close to the same for rent wherever you live.
      • bmelton 14y ago
        In my experience, that's not the case at all. It might be true for large populaces, or big city areas, but the difference between say, Memphis, TN and Annapolis, MD is huge. I got a 200% pay increase when I moved, only to find that the majority of it is consumed by the housing difference.
        • dennisgorelik 14y ago
          3x in pay just by moving from Memphis to Annapolis? That means you were grossly underpaid and could likely get 2x increase just by changing employer and staying in Memphis.
          • bmelton 14y ago
            It's not at all improbable that I was underpaid, though I highly doubt that I could have gotten 2x. It's also worth noting that I switched career paths at the same time and moved from a strictly engineering role to an enterprise architecture role.
            • dennisgorelik 14y ago
              2x is still 33% less than 3x (in Annapolis). Was it hard to find enterprise architecture position in Memphis?
              • bmelton 14y ago
                For a bit of backstory, I had already decided to leave Memphis for reasons that had nothing to do with job or pay, and was literally in the market to go anywhere. Shortly after casting my resume to far broader nets than I ever had (I had interest from companies in London, Australia, Boulder, CO, Bay Area, etc.) we took a vacation to visit some friends in the Annapolis area and I fell in love with the place. With that, I decided to refocus my job search and someone I'd known years prior hired me on for a security-clearance required position in the federal government at a job I'd never done (but which he thought I was qualified for). Because of the customer, my contacts, and the cost of livings increases, I was paid a salary well above the "2012 average base salary" for a Google engineer per the linked article. Before that, I had made something like $60k. Except for some very specialized positions (SAP, EMC, etc.) in Memphis, I don't know of any engineers making much above $100,000 (though indeed $100,000 in Memphis is a very respectable salary.) Since leaving, I've had a number of Memphis-based employers trying to buy me back into the area, but the discussion generally dies when we get into money as, at least from my anecdotal experience, wages just aren't that high around there, and the only large paying employers are those who have successfully commoditized the market (FedEx, International Paper, etc.) and aren't hiring 'rockstars'. In summation, while I'm sure there are people making what I make or above in my field in Memphis, it is by no means as common as a six figure salary in the valley, or bay area, or in places where there are large IT-based firms that are competing for talent. Even if there were, I wouldn't really have been qualified at the time - at least mentally, having taken a job I didn't feel qualified for and making absolutely damn certain I performed well at it made for interesting times, but ultimately boosted my overall confidence a million-fold. Edit: I would also be remiss to add that at least amongst my peers, colleagues and family, I was doing fairly well. A lot of that had to do with the TN cost of living.
  • joezydeco 14y ago
    CNN has a cost of living calculator that seems to take grocery , housing, utility, transportation, and healthcare factors into account. http://cgi.money.cnn.com/tools/costofliving/costofliving.html http://cgi.money.cnn.com/tools/costofliving/costofliving.htm... 107,798 in SF would be 73,278 in Minneapolis
    • alaithea 14y ago
      Just an FYI for those in DC: on that calculator, Washington is listed under the state of Virginia. Geographic boundaries are tricky business, but c'mon, CNN. You could at least pretend District of Columbia is a state.
      • bmelton 14y ago
        But it's not a state, it's a district. I'll grant you that it's obviously a place where people live and work; but a state it is not.
        • alaithea 14y ago
          I did say "pretend." I'm not interested in debating DC statehood, rather I am interested in a good user experience. In my case, I actually live in Maryland, yet I had to pull up Virginia to find my metro area.
    • Evbn 14y ago
      Still missing the point. Consider the common case of earning and saving in NY and retiring to FL. One has to distinguish cost of living for a non-saver from cost-of-living for a saver.
      • rada 14y ago
        On the other hand, consider the more realistic scenario of renting in NY vs. building house equity elsewhere. Given that house equity is the prevalent savings scenario in the US, the average New Yorker has a higher cost of living and a lower savings rate.
  • _delirium 14y ago
    In particular, you shouldn't adjust for CoL any parts of your salary that will be spent on (nonlocal) trips/vacations, or on nationally priced consumer goods. The cost of big-screen televisions or Xbox games doesn't get any cheaper when you move from San Francisco to Fresno, for example, and neither does the cost of taking a trip to Paris. The CoL calculators, as they're usually implemented, make the most sense for people with no real disposable income beyond living expenses, but they don't make a lot of sense for Google-level salaries.
    • praptak 14y ago
      > they don't make a lot of sense for Google-level salaries. Yes. This was my point. > you shouldn't adjust for CoL any parts of your salary that will be spent on trips/vacations, or on nationally priced consumer goods. Indeed, the real comparison of salaries should take into account what you plan to do with the income above the CoL. To the above I would also add that the interest on the rest of your cash stash (you don't plan to spend all of it on LCDs and trips?) is pretty much independent of where you live.
    • joezydeco 14y ago
      Are you counting sales taxes? How about income taxes? Both affect your ability to buy even national goods, especially now that states are starting to enforce sales taxes on out-of-state items. Anyone from CA want to chime on what state income and sales taxes are compared to the rest of the country?
      • rada 14y ago
        I can't speak for California but for New York vs. Minnesota, the taxes breakdown is roughly: 50% in NYC vs. 35% in Minnie. When you look at mortgage deductions - a far more common scenario in the "rest of the country" - the difference is even greater.
        • _delirium 14y ago
          I'm getting much lower rates when I plug them into tax calculators. For example, if you make $100k, are single, and take the standard deduction, you pay an overall $18k in federal income tax (18%) and just under $7k in MN income tax (7%), for 25% total. YMMV if you have a spouse, kids, or a mortgage, of course.
  • hnriot 14y ago
    Your paragraph makes no logical sense, a 20k raise is not the same wherever you live, taxes and the things you'll ultimately buy with it vary in cost so it's incomparable. Notice how the salary adjustment jives with the CNN calculator too, this is because the cola takes into account the things that people need to spend their salary on, if you buy a vw microbus and sleep in the office parking lot every night and have minimal dining needs then you will notice an absolute difference between regions, otherwise you won't, the salary variance is eaten by the cost of all he usual things people do.
• DannyBee 14y ago
  Yeah, I was gonna say, this is just crazy. I'm a google person, moving from one side of the country (Maryland) to the other (Mountain View), and the price differences are hilarious. Income taxes are roughly the same in both states (~10%), but for the price of a 2500 sq ft house in the Bay Area, I could get a 4000 sq ft house with gold plated bathtubs in Maryland/Virginia. In turn, the property taxes will also be double or triple what I pay now (~5k) because of the high housing prices. Of course, the traffic is actually significantly better in the bay area than in DC, so i could live farther away and have less of a commute, but still.
  • oscardelben 14y ago
    The traffic in the bay area is pretty bad, too.
• smackfu 14y ago
  This also ignores that some of these companies are very big on telecommuting and others aren't. The fact that I can telecommute to my current job is probably worth $10k to me.
• ditonal 14y ago
  I personally think the "cost of living" argument is bogus a huge portion of the time, at least it was for me when I moved from Maryland to NYC. Sure, rent is expensive. That's about it, and even then if you're willing to live in the right part of Jersey you can still be 30 minutes from work and have very cheap rent. Most big ticket items are the same. Anything ordered from Amazon is the same. Laptops, tablets, sound systems - the same. Tons of clothing deals all over the city. Food is actually cheaper because there are so many little farmer markets and dollar stores. I understand that if you just go by what some people are paying for a hamburger, you could think that NYC is much more expensive, but you don't have to eat at the same place i-bankers and tourists eat! A street gyro cost $4 and there's $1 slices of pizza. Finally, even if the cost of living is higher, it's not a comparable product. You are paying not only to have a place to sleep, but you are also paying to live in New York City, one of the most exciting cities in the world with endless amounts of diverse people, places, and activities. Paying higher rent so that you can live in the city many people dream about makes sense, and the fact that salaries are largely adjusted to make this a reasonable proposition makes it an easy choice.
  • netcan 14y ago
    Yeah, look... it's an impossible problem. On one hand you put your finger on it. Your life in place A is completely different then your life in place B so trying to so that you are paying x% more per sqft and therefore you arre y% poorer is obviously nonsense. Same goes for inflation calculators. This week you spent your money on iPads, international foods, air travel, divorce lawyers and antidepressants. 200 years ago you could have taken that money and bought this many slaves, that much bread and a weekly leaching. Therefore $1 in 1804 is worth $349 in todays money. On the other hand there obviously is such a thing as inflation over time and cost of living variances. You can tell because you can live in a house, eat food and drive a car with a certain amount of money in one place but you can't pay for a the smallest apartment in another place with the same amount.
  • skittles 14y ago
    I think a lot of people lower their standard of living when they move to expensive places. For instance, I live in the mid-west in a 5-bedroom, 3-bath house with a 2-car garage. My wife and I own 2 reliable cars, and we eat at mid-level restaurants almost every day. If we tried to live a comparable life in NYC, I'm certain the cost-of-living argument would apply.
• babs474 14y ago
  The minneapolis tech market seems to underrated and overlooked. The salaries in the article are not uncommon, demand is high and the cost of living difference is huge. The big drawback being that the tech culture tends to be weighted in the enterprisey java direction. But hey, we have startups too http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4636880 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4636880
  • rada 14y ago
    I've moved to Minneapolis a couple years ago and I've been very impressed by the startup scene. I've had a chance to attend one MinneBar (http://minnestar.org/minnebar/ http://minnestar.org/minnebar/) and one MinneDemo (http://minnestar.org/minnedemo/ http://minnestar.org/minnedemo/) and see 30-40 startups present. Out of that number, about 5 were in solid black, 5 were easily cash-flow positive, and 5 more well on the way. Minnesota does not have the superstar startups but there are definitely a lot of solid performers.
• mronge 14y ago
  The cost of living difference between Minneapolis and San Francisco is HUGE. For the cost of an apartment in San Francisco you could have a huge house on 1/2 an acre of land in the Minneapolis area. This calculator takes into account more, like housing, food etc: http://www.bestplaces.net/col/?salary=107798%20&city1=50667000&city2=52743000 http://www.bestplaces.net/col/?salary=107798%20&city1=50... "A salary of $107,798 in San Francisco, California could decrease to $56,716 in Minneapolis, Minnesota" Which is much more in line with my personal experience having worked in both Silicon Valley and Minneapolis. If you're a good engineer, it is not uncommon to pull down 107k or more in Minneapolis as well.
  • dennisgorelik 14y ago
    If you are single or DINK (dual-income-no-kids) and don't really need more than one-bedroom apartment - you would probably be better off living in Bay Area and working for Google (or whatever). That way you would be able to accumulate cash faster or travel internationally a lot more. With kids - it's better live in a provincial suburb, have big house with nice backyard while working for 30% smaller salary.
• rada 14y ago
  Minneapolis has a weird thing going on that skews the salaries to the low end of the scale. People just don't move. I've tried to recruit a couple friends who are really unhappy in their jobs, and they don't want to even hear about it. Literally: they hate their boss, the work is stale, the commute is an hour each way, the salary is low - and yet, they won't even consider a job that offers a 30% raise, half the commute, newest technologies, a $5k equipment package, work from home twice a week, etc. It's mind boggling, but there it is. In my experience, the higher salaries are easily available. I've been consistently offered much more than $70k and the recruiters are desperate. So I'd say the job market in Minneapolis is actually quite hot - it's the talent that doesn't take advantage of it.
  • babs474 14y ago
    This is right on. It is so frustrating to see really excellent talent rot away in some intertech cube farm, but I see it a lot. Is it a midwest culture thing? I guess it opens up opportunities for people who aren't so risk averse though.
    • rada 14y ago
      Is it a midwest culture thing? I don't know. Any thoughts are welcome.
      • pnathan 14y ago
        I work with people who think shifting jobs more than once per 5 years means you're sketchy. So there's that too.
    • emperorcezar 14y ago
      I live outside Chicago. People in the midwest tend to be here because it's where family is. You can offer anything you want, but it would have to be ridiculous to get my wife to move away from her family.
  • sopooneo 14y ago
    Just to clarify, do you mean that people won't move to Minneapolis, won't move from Minneapolis, or people all over the country generally don't want to relocate?
• Graham24 14y ago
  I know nothing about Minneapolis, why is it so cheap? is it a bit rubbish?
  • Evbn 14y ago
    It is beautiful, and has perfect summers, but a cold snowy winter.
• rm999 14y ago
  A high cost of living often means the area is desirable to live in, which is hard to value. SF has much nicer weather and culture than Minneapolis, which to many people is worth a lot more than the cost of living difference. Think of it this way: people want to live in desirable places even if they have jobs that don't adjust for cost of living.