Not being able to raise a family on less than 200k in NYC basically screams unrealistic expectations. There are plenty of software engineers with families in th

Not being able to raise a family on less than 200k in NYC basically screams unrealistic expectations. There are plenty of software engineers with families in the city and suburbs. They are probably doing something wrong. Especially if both husband and wife are good software engineers (say Google), there is no problem at all. And most quant salaries are not that high, I guess less than 50% of them make >200k. Again, you are probably cherry-picking successful quants working for big banks and funds and that gives you very high expectations.