Exactly. I consider a "comfortable" lifestyle to be a 3BR house in a safe neighborhood, 2 reliable cars, 2 week+ domestic vacations/year, plus saving enough to give a nice cushion in case of emergencies / retirement.
I'm terrible with budgeting / saving and I was doing this working for a startup on a $120k/year salary. Granted, this was 10 years ago and housing has appreciated significantly since then, but still. $200k would be more than enough to enjoy this sort of comfortable lifestyle.
And I don't put renting in the "very comfortable" category. Nor do I put "reliable" cars or domestic vacations. Safe neighborhood? It's expensive - $2m expensive.
Do you have any real insight to the CURRENT housing market in the SF Bay Area? Housing is the big cost. It's more expensive to have a garage for a Porsche than the Porsche itself. I can literally go out tomorrow and buy a 911 but CANNOT afford to put it in a garage. That's how fucking ridiculous it is.
Yes they are. I know people who've gotten them. You can find a 3br/2bath single family home with a garage, for less than 5K/mo in SF, Redwood City, Palo Alto, and tons in Sunnyvale and Mountain View.
> I can literally go out tomorrow and buy a 911 but CANNOT afford to put it in a garage.
The 911 costs more than a year's rent on said 3/2 SFH with a garage. For many, it's more than 2 years rent. Yes, if you want to own a $100k car, you'll have to sacrifice in other parts of your life.
Show me the listings! https://sfbay.craigslist.org/d/apartments-housing-for-rent/s...
You're all ignoring the general sentiment anyway. Not like it matters. Cherrypick all you want. Beating a dead horse. People are so dumb here about COL - acting as if $200k is truly enough to "very comfortably" live here. Ask any engineer in SV if they want to just stay at $200k/yr household income (and they don't own a home and they don't have wealth) for the rest of their life and they'll say no.
Yes, because people want to be more than simply comfortable.
The area isn’t that bad except for COL. Once you’re rich, it isn’t that bad. So, just get rich. That’s the basics of it. It sucks but at least there is a solution for those that are ambitious enough. Can’t fix bad weather or jobs.
"People in other areas have jobs. People in SV have careers."
This seems a little over generalized and even pompous. There are plenty of people who have careers in other areas. Just as a single example, how about the financial developers in NYC, like at Jane Street? There are plenty of people who leave SV too.
People here keep nitpicking about the generality of statements I'm making. They're not getting the general vibe and the general vibe is the point. Just because you can cherrypick some data that says there are people with careers or people with PhDs in some other area does not mean that it is like SV. Surely you understand that?
Who the fuck would move here when homes are $2-3m? People who are dedicated. That's the difference. People talk about leaving the bay area to slow down or give up careers. They don't talk about leaving the bay area to start the next big thing. (Regardless of all the BS you see about X cheap-ass company moving to Y city)
I think it's more about people who want some sort of status or virtue signaling. There are plenty of successful start ups in other cities like Seattle, NYC, NOVA, Austin, etc.
I think the reason people are "nitpicking" is because the majority of people don't live in SV. So if anything, talking about dev salary and saying $400k is barely enough, one would have to cherry pick data from SV to justify that statement.
In what way is this not "comfortable"? What is your definition of "comfortable"?
Like, I grew up in a 3BR, 2 car garage house that was <2000 SqFt. It was absolutely "comfortable". I had friends who were lower income who had smaller houses who were comfortable.
You're describing an inflated, luxury lifestyle. You even sort of admit it when you say "very comfortable lifestyle for most people in tech". That's not "very comfortable", that's "very comfortable for people who are already very comfortable". I feel like this is a sort of keeping up with the joneses thing: comfortable implies "more comfortable than the median person in your social circle, where your social circle is all tech people with 400K a year or more household incomes".
Like another way of putting this is that a 400K income should allow you to afford a nice 3-BR rental and kids and save money. If you don't have kids, 400K allows you to keep a luxury apartment in SF and another one in the south bay, you know, if you want to do that.