What everyone in the Bay Area with a decent income does: live a life of complete luxury but pretend like you are middle class because somone else makes more than you. Eat out for every meal. Never do manual labor of any kind—press a few buttons for laundry, food, handyman services, or transportation. Have “the best” TV, stereo, and home appliances. Or have children drive them around in strollers that cost more than an old used car. Subscribe to services for everything: diapers, vinyl, beauty products, clothing. Go out drinking and spend more money than a median income family spends on groceries in week.

When parking costs more than a car payment, it’s cheaper to pay others to drive you around for the few trips not convenient on a bike or public transit. The splurge is being able to drive yourself.

As a renter, you’re not allowed to work on your home and probably don’t have access to a washer/dryer. There are laundromats, but your cargo-hauling capabilities are severely limited, so unless it’s nearby you’re paying for cargo hauling one way or the other.

Since transportation-with-cargo is such a clusterfuck and the local retail skews heavily upscale to afford the exorbitant commercial rents, getting most consumer goods delivered makes complete sense.

No argument on the cost of going out so frequently, but cooking for one isn’t necessarily cheaper than takeout, depending on your local grocery stores. (Yes, you can be deliberate about picking cheap meals to cook).

Living in San Francisco imposes different problems and different constraints than living in typical American suburbia; choices that would be exorbitant in one place can be efficient in the other.

Agreed dense cities shift trade-offs, but as some notes:

> As a renter, you’re not allowed to work on your home and probably don’t have access to a washer/dryer

Only in the lowest end places is this true. (it's been true once for me exactly once out of 6 places I've rented in SF) Most software eng can afford to rent places with at least shared laundry.

> Since transportation-with-cargo is such a clusterfuck and the local retail skews heavily upscale to afford the exorbitant commercial rents, getting most consumer goods delivered makes complete sense.

And it saves time as well. Even in suburbia I don't want to go to the grocery store when Amazon can deliver items for me.

> Most software eng can afford to rent places with at least shared laundry.

Yes, so most software engineers wouldn't use a laundry service. But for those that do, I'm reasonably certain this is why.

> What everyone in the Bay Area with a decent income does

Obviously not everyone. This bears no resemblance to my lifestyle. Can we cool it with the generalizations?

Nor mine, but it seems overwhelmingly the norm among my peers in Seattle.

Are you poor?

This sounds more like the lifestyle of a stereotypical "tech bro" than a normal tech salaryman with a family.

Ouch. So true.

Is this a joke?

Matches my SF coworkers so I have to say no

I don't think so. That seems consistent with London too.

I've been in the bay area 18 years now. I am a software engineer for a major company. My life is far simpler than this. I almost never eat meals out, I do all my own grocery shopping and cooking. I don't own a car because my needs are simple (public transit / walk to grocery store, company shuttle, and Uber for weekends) so I guess the comment OP got that right. I live in a one bedroom apartment that I clean myself. Is this unusual? All my friends seem to be in similar situations.

Still sounds like a typical middle class working professional lifestyle to me, and I'm not even living in a first world country at the moment.

This kind of lifestyle is possible anywhere with high inequality. All you need is for other people to be willing to work for so little that you can pay them to do stuff you don't want to do. Attaining this lifestyle can often be easier in developing countries than it is in developed countries because inequality is often higher in developing countries.

Not anymore! Ever since we tricked millennials into thinking that "flexibility" and "side hustle" is more important than a steady paycheck and benefits, you too can pay people a non-living wage to deliver your takeout!

No one tricked anyone. Automation, globalization, increased efficiency, and doubling of the labor supply by adding women reduced the price of labor, aka wages and all the gains went to capital owners.

Are you saying we should remove women from the workforce?!!

No, I'm just stating reasons for why individuals are finding it more difficult to raise a family on one income.

Show me the jobs with steady paychecks and benefits they're passing over for "flexibility."

My original comment was a bit of satire aimed at the so-called gig economy and the companies that make money by exploiting contract workers through marketing themselves as hipster cool, e.g. uber, postmates, taskrabbit, etc.

Actual middle class life: eat out once a week, if that. At least 50% manual labor. Maybe cable TV and a Netflix account. Someone in the house does laundry. Handyman services are not outsourced unless they require a professional. Used everything. Definitely no budget for luxury subscription services.

Typical middle class life is nothing like what I mentioned above. Nothing. Anyone who's ever been middle class or known someone who was actually middle class—that is something with a median income—would know this.

There is this tendency to use relevancy to say to somehow equate someone in the top 10% with the middle class. It's just bullshit.

>What do you plan to do with all this money?

Pray to god that it's enough to at least not fall into complete ruin and destitution from an illness or unforeseen layoff. I think most people now, like myself, have practically zero social or financial support beyond what you can save for yourself anymore.

A lot of people (including me) have targets for savings they just want to get to before getting out.

The targets for most people i know are usually achievable in <10 years.

Probably do the same thing my friends working the oil fields did: work hard, save as much money as possible, and move when done. Like programming, their skills translate fine outside the boom area.