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A comment on Does It Make Sense for Programmers to Move to the Bay Area?. Parent comment

Re:Does It Make Sense for Programmers to Move to the Bay Area? by nostrademons on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @02:27PM (#13178903)
There's a stage-of-life effect. Bay Area is great for young people, where cost of living is a much lower proportion of income. All the excess goes straight into savings or discretionary consumer goods, where a Bay Area dollar is worth just as much as a Rust Belt dollar. It's much less great for a family, where you have additional food, housing, childcare, and health costs that rise along with cost of living.
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Re:Does It Make Sense for Programmers to Move to the Bay Area? by mrkurt on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @03:52PM (#13179543)
I don't think that's entirely true. Housing and food are still the highest spending categories. Most of the excess goes to taxes, I think. Families just make it more obvious that's happening.
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Re:Does It Make Sense for Programmers to Move to the Bay Area? by morgante on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @10:31PM (#13182158)
> Housing and food are still the highest spending categories.

They can be your highest spending categories and still leave plenty of room left over to save.

As a young person living in NYC (high taxes, high housing, high food costs) I can still save a huge percentage of my income due to the high salaries.

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Re:Does It Make Sense for Programmers to Move to the Bay Area? by mrkurt on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @11:31PM (#13182427)
NYC is much more reasonable than the SF Bay. Manhatten itself is incredibly expensive, but it's fairly easy to live frugally in the NYC area. There's basically nowhere to go "in the bay area" to save much money.

You're not wrong about NYC, but the bay area is really broken.

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Re:Does It Make Sense for Programmers to Move to the Bay Area? by morgante on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @11:35PM (#13182440)
In my case, I was renting in Manhattan. When I've considered moving to SF I found plenty of comparable apartments for around $2.5k/m.
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Re:Does It Make Sense for Programmers to Move to the Bay Area? by chrisweekly on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @04:08PM (#13179680)
Childcare exceeds all other household expenses (incl housing) in a huge % of families. Wish I had stats to cite, none avlbl atm.
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Re:Does It Make Sense for Programmers to Move to the Bay Area? by mrkurt on Wednesday December 14, 2016 @04:11PM (#13179700)
Oh yes. That wasn't a factor for us (stay at home parenting!) but school expense would have been if we'd tried to get our kids good schooling.
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Re:Does It Make Sense for Programmers to Move to the Bay Area? by eatbitseveryday on Friday December 16, 2016 @08:26AM (#13193047)
Staying at home to parent means a missing income. I would include that as a cost.
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