Of course, discretionary income and salary are not the same thing. If you are a developer in the valley paying to live in Palo Alto, driving a BMW, etc. you too could choose to have a lot more discretionary income.
$60k is more than 88% of Americans make in total income. Having that for discretionary spending would place you well within the top 1-2% of Americans, regardless of how much or how little your living expenses are.
Although they obviously spend a lot [2], at some point discretionary income gets pretty blurry. I'd hope any reasonable society would consider they have a lot more than $60k at their discretion, though. I make about a third of that, putting me just barely in the top 10%, and have more than $60k at my discretion.
Wealth inequality is pretty insane in this country.
The calculator you linked is measuring household income, not individual income. Rerunning your numbers with a calculator that uses individual income [1], I find that the top 1% of individual earners make at least $270k/year and an income of $150k/year would put you just barely in the top 5% of individual earners.
Sure, you're right about the average American. I'm pretty sure most people in this discussion are taking about the perspective of someone who works in the tech industry in the bay area since that's what the article is about.
Right. Talking about that kind of money as merely "decently high" is only a slightly different kind of bubble as the one this medium post is satirizing.
Living expenses make up the majority of most people's living expenses, and this person owns the house they live in, which means it's possible their expenses aren't that high to begin with. They imply as much in their post. So it's possible their salary is like $70-75k.
The median salary in the US is $52k.
In light of that, I, too, would call his salary "decently high".
Yes, rents are part of the price of the ticket to work in SV, and as such does not constitute discretionary income. The extra cash you spend to drive a BMW instead of a five year old Nissan definitely most certainly does.
Yes, but even how much you pay for rent can be controlled, if you choose to.
You can easily find a room in an apartment for less than 1000 $/mo anywhere in the bay. It won't be a nice room if you choose to live in, say SoMa, but it's housing. So you could argue anything over that is "discretionary".
Obviously, many people would consider such a living situation unacceptable. But in the most general sense, it is still a choice.
That's true -- according to Trulia, the median rent right now in Palo Alto is $6100 vs. $3495 in San Jose. But I think it's kind of easy, living here, to lose sight of just how out of whack those costs are with the rest of the country. In Tampa, Florida (which is actually pretty close to the US average), it's $1495; even in Sacramento, about two hours from here, it's $1600. If you could stand the time sink, it's quite likely it would be cheaper to live in Sacramento and commute to the Bay Area.
None of this means that there aren't valid reasons for staying here; even giving up a fairly significant portion of my income as rent leaves me with more money than I'd likely have after rent if I had a comparable job in Tampa, assuming I could even find one. But I don't think this is a sustainable situation for the region. The nanny in the "This is your life in SV" satire, and other people in her salary range (or under it), are on the cusp of being pushed out of the area entirely.
I'm saying "decently high" compared to my software engineering peers in Silicon Valley. Of course, nearly every worker in the US has at least a decently high income compared to most of the world. The minimum wage in India is $3 per day.
