I live in probably the most expensive country on Earth, Norway, and at that wage I could work for 10-15 years, and with some smart, fairly conservative investing, assuming good times in the markets I could easily get retired at 40-45 if I wanted to.
Granted I live and generally prefer a very frugal lifestyle even when I am making good money, but still by my back of the mental napkin estimation I could even have 2 kids, a spouse, house and car and still have a ton of disposable income left over to save/invest.
Is there something I'm missing? Is rent in the valley $80k a year or some bizarro world number?
Kinda yea.
The average rent in the bay is around $3500, but for a house that is big enough for a family (eg. 3br, garage, etc) you're probably north of $6k. Don't forget, in America, you have to consider healthcare and other costs that may not be priced equally in Norway. The bay also has more expensive food, gas, and other daily expenses etc than the much of the rest of the US.
For example, I pay ~5k a month for a 2Br unit with a garage, at roughly 1k sqft.
I moved from a LCOL where I paid $1200/mo in mortgage + escrow on a 2600sqft 4br house, to a MCOL where I pay $3600/mo in rent for a 1200sqft 3br townhouse. The Bay Area is a HCOL in the US, for a similar property what I have now, it'd be $5k-$6k/mo in rent, plus everything else is also more expensive. Back of napkin, $191k/yr is roughly $128k/yr after taxes, which is roughly $10800/mo after taxes. If rent is $6k/mo, utilities are $400/mo, a car fully laden is $700/mo, and food is $1000/mo, you're left with just $2700, and I'm ignoring significant other expenses. If you have a child (which I do), childcare in SFBA is around $2500/mo, it's around $1800/mo where I'm at now.
Best case scenario, you can save $2k/mo, which puts you ahead of the majority of Americans. You're also renting, which has a continually rising cost which you have no control over. To buy a house you need 20% down to get a traditional mortgage, a typical (for the rest of America) home in SFBA is $3M on the low end, but probably closer to $4M. To save up the $600k you need for a down payment on a $3M house, it'll take 300 months saving $2k/mo, which is TWENTY-FIVE YEARS. So it'll take you 25 years, just to save the down payment so you can get a 30 year mortgage for a house in SFBA on $191k/yr. In 25 years, that $3M house /will/ be at least $5M just due to inflation, which means you're hitting a moving target, if you predict the rise and target it for savings, now you need 500 months or just shy of 42 years to save the /down payment/.
The SFBA is nearly the most expensive place on Earth to live. Norway doesn't even come close.
I make >$300k/yr in an MCOL, I did an analysis and determined if I wanted to move to the SFBA without a massive sacrifice in quality of life for my family, I'd need to earn at MINIMUM $700k/yr to match what we already have, and more realistically closer to $900k/yr. $191k/yr is not even worth considering in SFBA.
EDIT: That said, if this was a remote offering, that's a very decent salary in most of America, and Oxide is a very interesting company with people working there I'd love to work with just so I could be surrounded by their brilliance.
