undefined | Better HN

0 pointstristor3y ago0 comments

> Is there something I'm missing? Is rent in the valley $80k a year or some bizarro world number?

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.

0 comments

steveklabnik3y ago

In response to your edit, only about a quarter of the company is in the Bay Area today.

tristorOP3y ago

That's great to hear. My comment was more to put into some real numbers the cost of living in SFBA for the grandparent, since they seemed to be under some illusions. In most of the US, that's a very decent salary and would be more than doable, I think in the Bay it's only possible if you already own a home and/or are separately independently wealthy. Which honestly, is fine, more people need to not live in SFBA and live in the rest of the US, even in major cities, which are massively better from a COL perspective.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse