Sorry for the delay.

Yes. I’ve run the numbers several times. I have a 2 child family. Treating our house, child care, groceries, etc. as fungible I could take a 50% pay cut over SJC and “maintain” our quality of life on paper.

But details matter. I live in a community with 22 miles of maintained trail, some of the best school districts in the country (with no lottery system, we just pick a school), our grocery stores are better (better meat, better produce, better selection), etc.

After living both, I strongly suspect my current quality of life in PHX literally does not exist in the Bay Area no matter the price point.

Depends on what you are looking for and what your lifestyle is. For me, in PHX moving from a 3200 sqft place to a place in SF that was a 30-40 minutes commute (3bd, 1500sqft) would have changed my mortgage by at least 4k/month. But realistically it might end up more like 5-6k/month... because housing in SF is stupid fucking expensive. This is just on the mortgage alone mind you, not including taxes and other expenses.

To put in perspective of how little I pay, I pay about 1900/month for mortgage, taxes, insurance and HOA (which is like $150/month because we live in a gated area). I am about 30-45 minutes door to door from PHX airport.

On the low end, it would require ~75-80k before taxes just to make up the mortgage difference, and likely be more than that.

TL;DR: Yea, it can easily be 100k cheaper in PHX vs SF depending on your situation.