I feel like this line should be in the article.

Work at a valley company, live in a shoebox, bank maybe $500 a month, if you are lucky. Please explain to me your equation for making a lot of money.

If you can only bank $500/month working as a programmer in the bay area, something is very wrong (or you're just not living frugally at all). I bank way more than that as a mid level developer, granted I work at the big G, but I also support a non-working wife and kid.

Step 1: don't live in the valley.

apparently this is where all the stuff happens, It has been a year and I have realized how backwards life is here.

> Please explain to me your equation for making a lot of money

It's easy, "live beneath your means". Move away from the valley and give up that lifestyle. If you're a decent-ish programmer, you can make a bunch of money in any of the other medium sized cities in the US with a reasonable cost of living.

I work in Santa Clara, live in rental townhouse in San Jose. I have a 20 minute commute and reliably save 15% of my take home income. I have a wife who works part time and goes to school. She saves all her money.

Its about budgeting. We each keep a budget for our hobbies of about $100 per month. We spend about $200 at restaurants (eating out less than once per week). Most important is keeping a tab on your spending. UsBank has a download spreadsheet function that keeps track of your last export so it is very easy to download one month at a time.

Move out of the most expensive real estate in the country. Remote work is a thing in many organizations.

I have been begging my management to let me work remotely, but they have been pretty negative towards the idea.

"We would like to keep our team close" -- Management "Half of our team is in India" -- me ":shrug: go back to work" -- Management

Invest wisely and the equation will be "the exponential function."

Save that $500 a month, and you'll have enough within a year.

It's not a LOT of money, but enough to travel if that is what you want to do.

I travel, I just think that saving money is difficult to do for 80% of America. The gap widens as you expand to different countries worldwide.

decent programmer? you must not really know how tech works, shitty programmers make over 100k..