* get your nice free college in Europe
* go make a mountain of cash in California
* come back and retire in your 30's and start a family.
but that depends on a lot of things going right. I'd rather raise a family in most of Europe, and retire in Europe. But I can't deny that if I'd stayed in California I'd probably have $1-2 million more. And the tax structures here make FIRE _very_ difficult, depending on where you are. Portugal is appealing if your income is foreign (check out the NHR program), and Germany allows about 12k per year in capital gains tax-free if I recall.
It's 801€ per year, but you can deduct losses up to 20k.
From over here, US seems constantly at an edge of civil war/revolution. Lots of desperate people that jump at the first opportunity to riot and loot stuff.
Because otherwise it's difficult to judge. I sometimes read other countries complain about their awful rail system, and it turns out "the trains are sometimes 5 minutes late on Wednesdays", as they're used to punctual service at all other times.
But looking at Graz, Austria, a 80,000, even if gross, euro salary would provide a very good standard of living.
Graz is an amazing city for quality of life, nature and socializing, and is great if you want to be employed in academia your whole life. On the IT careers side, it's a wasteland of conservative hardware/automotive companies and IT service companies(cost centers) that only deal with the local market, or at best the DACH zone, and is therefore worse on pay than some Eastern European cities that deal with the international scene (Krakow, Warsaw, Bucharest, Cluj). Almost no product based IT companies who deal internationally.
Most tech jobs in Austria are where the money and infrastructure is, Vienna.
>a security hub https://cybersecurity-campus.tugraz.at
Outside of a handful of low-paid TU students and post-docs(basically academia), I think I can count the number of people employed there, on the fingers of my hand. AFAIK they aren't hiring anyone at the moment. Other of massive PR, no job openings, no investments, no tech companies and nothing significant materialized from that, just a few partnerships for PhD/research positions. Hardly a "security hub". A hub would mean you have a cluster of multiple private companies hiring people there to work on commercial solutions alongside research partnerships with universities. That's not what's happened.
The thing is, you earn less on paper than in the US, but your total cost of living (and thus, your "available" income) is way lower, too:
- healthcare is cheap and universally available, no need to stuff away money in HSAs to account for a sudden 100k$ bill from a broken leg or a million dollar bill from cancer
- public education for your children is free, you don't need to pay for private schools or (later on) for university
- housing costs are drastically lower than the US
- no need to stuff away money for pension because we actually have working government-backed pensions
- way less commute expenses - we tend to have working public transport and even if you commute by car, the distances involved are way less
- we have government-mandated vacation time - at the least 20 days a year, most employers offer around the 30 day range - and unlimited as-needed sick time, which also means you don't have to stuff away money for unpaid time off.
Hmm I wonder where this mythical cheap healthcare is...If you are not really sick (and most young people are not) you typically pay for things anyway (dental care)
>- public education for your children is free, you don't need to pay for private schools or (later on) for university
I dont have children? And judging by birth rates a lot of people dont as well.
>- housing costs are drastically lower than the US
Are housing costs relative to tech salaries really lower than the US?
>- no need to stuff away money for pension because we actually have working government-backed pensions
Again as a young, ambitious individual in Tech I would rather have more disposable income than rely on a ponzi scheme that's the gov-backed pension system.
>- way less commute expenses - we tend to have working public transport and even if you commute by car, the distances involved are way less
And we live in cramped,tiny,noisy,apartments...I would rather commute from a suburb and have a house with a garden.
>- we have government-mandated vacation time - at the least 20 days a year, most employers offer around the 30 day range - and unlimited as-needed sick time, which also means you don't have to stuff away money for unpaid time off.
Unlimited PTOs or european level PTOs are very common in US tech companies.
Agreed, but lower fertility rates are common in wealthier countries - an effect notable enough to be recognizable even in first-generation migrants. When you don't have to have a literal dozen children so that one or two make it to adulthood to support you in old age, you're fine with having one or two - or even none, given that we have support systems for old people backed by society as a whole instead of families having to take care for themselves.
> Are housing costs relative to tech salaries really lower than the US?
Yes. Here in Germany, while I agree that rents are way too high, we simply don't have something like "working homeless".
> Again as a young, ambitious individual in Tech I would rather have more disposable income than rely on a ponzi scheme that's the gov-backed pension system.
Wonder who's gonna pick up the tab for you once you are in pension.
Does the US have "working homeless" among people earning "tech" salaries?
Wonder who's gonna pick up the tab for you once you are in pension.
If you're earning US level take home salaries you should have zero problems financing your own pension plan.
> you typically pay for things anyway (dental care)
Ah yes, dental care. The thing that's literelly not included in healthcare in most places.
> I would rather commute from a suburb and have a house with a garden.
Literally nothing prevents you from doing that in Europe. Houses might be smaller depending on the country, but this exists.
Except, you know, money. In DE/AT houses are insanely expresive relative to net pay.
Looked around Munich you can find options between 500k and 700k around 20km. I wouldn't be surprised if houses inside the city would cost ~1Mi (but we're talking about suburbs right? and cities grow differently)
Around Dublin you can find for that range or even less, inside the city (in liveable areas)
For comparison, searching around Chicago it's probably a bit less (though with bigger surface area) - excluding the foreclosures or fixer-uppers.
Buying a house in SV is also insanely expensive even with SV salaries, so.
At least you can actually buy a house here. A friend of mine is a teacher and just bought a 180 m² house plus garden in the suburbs of Munich, 20 minutes from the city center.
And a friend of mine works with the president and took me on a space ship to the moon. Is this how this game works? How much is his teacher's salary and how much did the house cost? Those are important details worth mentioning to form an argument. Otherwise, without stating any facts, we're just making stuff up.
I worked with Munich devs and they all said you can't afford a house in the suburbs without an inheritance due to how insane the Munich housing bubble has gotten with houses going for over a million Euros, so I doubt your friend could buy a house just on mortgage based on his salary.
Lol, NO. Every Gen Z to Millennial European I talked to knows that our pyramid pension system is a scam and will collapse by the time we'll retire. Unless we happen to die before we can reitre at the age of 85 or whatever it will be increased to until then.
If you want to survive off your pension in 30-50 years, then you'd better have made some solid investments, otherwise your government pension will be worthless by then.
No kids: USA > Europe
1 kid: they are similar
2 kids or more: Europe > USA
In the USA each kid is an extra 3000 usd a month expense at least, more if one goes private and include university tuition.
How parents can pay for two or more kids’s education in USA (or UK) is beyond me.
With two or more kids in USA you essential force your children into wage slavery by going into huge amounts of college debt.
https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/cqegh2/daycar...
https://www.reddit.com/r/breakingmom/comments/qtk3d8/how_we_...
So the difference is conservatively 2000 extra per month per child.
The point is this scales linearly so two kids is 4000, three is 6000.
The amount of child expenses in Europe goes up hundreds per month. In USA it goes up by thousands a month. That’s an order of magnitude difference.
More kids, the better Europe becomes compared to USA.
I doubt that, or at least it is very dependent on where you live. Both cars, gas and parking (as most employers in the US seem to offer free parking for employees) is generally much cheaper in the US. And while most places in Europe have (more or less) working public transport it is quite expensive. In the US I've used public transport in New York City, Chicago and Washington DC and they all had significantly cheaper public transport than here in Sweden for example.
This doesn't seem to be true. A 30 day commuter pass in New York costs $127. https://new.mta.info/fares
In stockholm a similar pass costs 970 SEK, or about $100.
https://mitt.sl.se/sv/kop-biljett/#/periodbiljett
So public transit seems to be significantly cheaper in Stockholm than New York at least.
That doesn't happen magically, it's being deducted from your paycheck (i.e you are stuffing away money).
Austria is, with few exceptions, a very bad market for tech/IT careers. Oversupply of talent but low VC investments, small market with focus on networking, culture that values middle managers way more than ICs, archaic culture with too much emphasis on titles and degrees, high taxes, poor fiber infrastructure in cities, hyper conservative cash-based society, inflexibility to remote work and freelancing for foreign companies due to complex government bureaucracy, high real estate prices(for buying), non-competes are legal and enforceable, all-in contracts with zero overtime pay, 25 vacation days standard for most tech workers, company benefits are non existent unless you count free coffee and a banana, companies focusing more on hiring seniors and rarely hiring or training juniors, almost no product based SW companies with the IT industry being mostly service based (in other words, a cost center); I could go on.
Quality of life is great though but tech careers here are a joke, even Eastern Europe has better and more exiting opportunities now due to the influx of outsourcing from US/UK unicorns.
People rarely make 80k/year here and everything here is expensive af. I dont recommend anyone young and ambitious to work in tech here.