House (or medium/large condo): bought in last 3 years $1.5mm usd Mortgage (20% down): $105,000/year Property taxes: $17,000/year Maintenance: between $3600-11,000/year (including capital things like AC, roof, flooring, repainting interior, foundation amortized) Total: $133,000/year

Family: Grocery: $20,000/yr Daycare 2 kids: $48,000/yr (yes daycare is $2000/mo in SF... to START) Transportation: $8,000/yr (car payment + insurance + gas) Annual one week "really nice" vacation: $10,000 (4 round trip tickets, 2 hotel rooms, food, transport, entertainment etc) Misc costs: $10,000 Total: $96,000

Comes out to about $230k/year in raw expenses. These are pretty accurate for 2021 San Francisco 40 minutes walking distance from FiDi. Of course there's no way you'd qualify for an $8500/mo mortgage on that salary (19k/mo) so instead you'd have to settle for a 2 bedroom condo ($960,000? maybe? can you squeeze 2 adults and 2 kids into 1050 sq feet? long term?) for the four of you, sharing one car.

You might be able to pull this off on $300,000 with substantial help from family if they are local, but after taxes etc you will be struggling to save 1% of your income and not really building/maintaining an emergency fund or building savings for other projects/hobbies.

> $1.5mm usd Mortgage (20% down): $105,000/year

That's way too high. https://www.bankrate.com/mortgages/mortgage-calculator/ gives ~83k/year at presumably today's interest rate (5.61%). At a quite plausible 3.5% it's ~65k.

Seems kind of disingenuous to include the down payment as a cost considering, in principle, it's a transfer of one kind of wealth to another. Otherwise, your expenses line up well with my own family's expenses in the Bay Area.

Same for the monthly mortgage payment, at least the part that goes towards the principal.

The real killer is that if the house needs work - and it will, because the housing stock here is very old and wasn't exactly well built to begin with - the cost of the work in the bay area is 1.5x at least most other areas of the country.

If you put minimal effort into controlling costs this actually makes sense. But for a real-life example, my family of 3 (one kid) has expenses of about <1/3rd of that, childcare included.

That's a pretty real-life example. Are you an owner in that area that bought in the last three years? How long were you wait-listed on daycare? How close to fidi are you? If you're willing to cart your kid all the way to the sunset every day you can find cheaper daycare, or if you're renting your costs are going to be way lower.

California makes it more difficult in that the salary required for a home pushes you past thresholds for financial aid. You might be what’s known as “house poor” but the university sees the house as an asset that counts towards a high net worth. There are even some prestigious private universities offering “no tuition for families making less than $150k (or thereabouts)”.

(OP here)

Correct about not including RSUs in that footnote. Since I've always budgeted to live off salary and not bonus/RSUs, they weren't part of that particular calculation.

Obviously my W2 will look very different in 2022, since RSUs essentially get treated as cash grants and startup options are illiquid.