For the average person, flying to work every day is unrealistic. If you are making $1M/year, it suddenly becomes very realistic. Same day roundtrips between SFO and Seattle via coach are about $200 when purchased 3 months out. Times 200 workdays/year, that's only $40K/year. You end up way ahead financially buying in Seattle and commuting by plane to your job in SF, if you're willing to stomach the ~6 hours/day of commuting time.

Then if you don't want to spend an hour and a half in the terminal, you can fly private jet. Private jet time apparently runs about $5k/hour. At ~600 hours/year, you're looking at about 3 million a year to commute by private jet from Seattle to SFO. Still out of your price range at a million in salary, but quite doable if you were making say $10m, and your commute time isn't much worse than sitting in traffic on 101 between Google and the Marina.

Replace Seattle with Las Vegas and all 3 of (housing, flight time, expense) get better. Round-trip to Vegas is about an hour and a half; coach prices go as low as $59 and private jet prices would be about $1-1.5M/year; and houses can be had for $200K, freeing up lots of money for flying.

Tax residency.

Consider what happens if you lose that job. How much money do you need saved up to live the next 6 months in both scenarios?

If I pay $750K/yr, I need $325K saved up to pay rent for 6 months. That will take me 1.3 years of saving to get to that threshold (assuming I pay for nothing else - food, etc).

If I pay $50K/yr, I need $25K saved up to pay rent for 6 months. It will take me 4 months.

Depending on how long you live, etc, I suppose there is a point where the former is better. But not in the short term. That's assuming you're paying mortgage and not rent. What if this is pure rent?

Then you have to pay that much even in retirement. That means you have to save up a lot more in the first scenario before you can retire, and may have to work longer, despite the higher pay, and the higher savings.

Of course, you can always retire in a cheaper place, but that's a matter of preference. I would rather retire in the place I lived much of my life in - not in some strange city.

The point remains, in the first scenario the person has $250,000 worth of disposable income. In the latter it's only $150,00. The former is in a much better position to build up saving. Heck, even one year's worth of post-rent income in savings is enough to spend as much money as the average American annual income (~35k) for the next 7 years.

> Then you have to pay that much even in retirement. That means you have to save up a lot more in the first scenario before you can retire, and may have to work longer, despite the higher pay, and the higher savings. Of course, you can always retire in a cheaper place, but that's a matter of preference. I would rather retire in the place I lived much of my life in - not in some strange city.

Sure, but now you're talking about a drastically different scenario if the resident has concluded they will live the rest of their life in their apartment. In that scenario, optimizing for post-employment living is a more important factor. But until unless you've decided to retire in your current apartment, the first choice is strictly better.

>Compared to, say, someone making $200,00 post tax and spending only 25% of that on rent it is strictly better.

Essentially, I claimed that Scenario X is better than scenario Y, but now you're saying "but! What if scenario X suddenly becomes scenario Z?".