anything within 45 minutes of your office in palo alto (where you are mandated to show up 5 days a week). this will get you a 1300sqft piece of shit built in 1964 with asbestos and lead paint and lead pipes and a cracked foundation (also some dipshit realtor had them paint all the original wood beams and paneling inside gloss white and replace the original wood and slate floors with grey vinyl) from some baby boomer forklift driver or mailman who paid 40k for it (you will pay 40k per year in property taxes for it), all for the privilege of “only” spending an hour of your life a day commuting so you can sit in your assigned area of your open concept office with noise canceling headphones on zoom meetings for 4 hours a day surrounded by other people on zoom meetings who also just expended a collective 5000 man hours and countless CO2 emissions to be there.
Every now and then I dream about how much more money I'd be making if I lived in the Bay Area, but then I read something like this and realize that earning ~half as much working remotely from a cheaper (at least when I bought) city maybe isn't so bad.
They are greatly exaggerating. One tangible advantage to living somewhere expensive with higher salaries is that anything you can buy online is effectively that much cheaper. An iPhone costs the same in Arkansas as in San Jose, so you'd end up working many more hours to buy one in AR than in CA, on average.
Yes, housing is more expensive. A lot more. Everything else is way cheaper.
Thank you, so many people like to go about cost-of-living and pretending things are equal because of that, but the vast majority of goods people buy are not priced that way, and in truly remote places the cost of goods actually go up. The land or housing might be cheap, but pretty much everything else costs the same, so the lower paying job still hurts.
I would say the vast majority of spending is affected by COL, since it’s all incorporating price of labor. Maybe not the majority of goods but that’s often a smaller part of spending.
I will say though that travel is the main one that’s obviously independent of where you live (at least mostly). So that’s kind of nice.
The trick is to rent cheap and live like a college student in SF/bay area while young, save aggressively, invest intelligently, then move somewhere comfortable but more affordable (CO's front range is lovely) for your 30s/40s.
I'm so so so glad I didn't spend my twenties working and saving.
I've lived a thousand lives, spent most of the time as true quality time with people I love, and I still have a few years left in this decade of my life.
And I'm still further ahead, financially speaking, than >99% of other people my age. (To those asking, I tripled down on life after getting a remote job.)
The one year I spent 9-5 in an office as a traditional SWE was by far the quickest and least eventful year of my life. Also probably the saddest.
I'm very glad I just said "no" and walked away and simply lived. It was absolutely worth the risk. I would never trade these years for the ability to buy a house in the Bay Area suburbs.
I probably will be able to do that anyways, if I want to, even though I don't.
Except you’re a wage slave and your American Nightmare comes with a mortgage, your sizable interest payments are likely funding the retirement income of a boomer too (along with bankers too, they always get a cut)
90K is still 50% above the median income, not to mention the fact that you have twice as much as time available and using just a small amount of that can be used to cut costs significantly in other areas. It is more effectively a $150K income if we add in the median wage from the job you aren't doing.
This. I moved in a developing nation with a GDP smaller than most US states. I have access to excellent modern healthcare and facilities, get more than 5 minutes in front of my doctor, often 1/2 hour+, and my (nearly 60 years old) health insurance is less than 75 usd a month. Covers 90 percent plus, including mental health, limited dental, and optical. The healthcare sector is private / public hybrid, profitable, and growing. Hands down better in every way than the US state I left.
Dominican Republic. The medical tourism industry here is booming as well. The public sector facilities are not as nice, but you can get free care for the vast majority of basic things that a person needs, without worrying about a bill. Still, people that can usually use private clinics because the experience / comfort/convenience is much better.
What they do subsidize here is education. Anyone with the drive and family support to do so can become a doctor, but you have to do a rotation in the public medical facilities to maintain your licence, and all public hospitals are teaching hospitals, so your case will be observed by 10 to 15 students and a bunch of residents if it’s interesting.
The system seems to work well.
I should also clarify that 75 dollars is about a weeks wages here at minimum wage, so roughly equivalent to $400 in the us economy. That figure tracks for most cost of living expenses here, except luxury items which are typically more expensive here than in the USA.
lol no. Private health insurance in Germany is ~800-1000 for a 60 y.o. – public insurance might be cheaper, but you need to qualify for that when you move here by working as an employee when you're that old. Working permission will require you to work full time. So you'll end up working full time and pay ~600-1200 (based on your salary) in contributions.
I never said public healthcare is free for strangers. It’s rarely the case.
Most of the time if you are not a citizen you need to either work or pay taxes. In fact even if you are a citizen, you may not be covered if you live abroad.
It’s relatively easy to be covered as a stranger : in 99% of situations, if you just set up here seriously and not as a tourist, you’ll be covered. I count a 60yo who never contributed to the system or worked here as a tourist.
Yeah, I run a coffee /cacao farm that employs a few locals, but obviously I don’t qualify for the government insurance. My insurance is private/ un subsidized.
Except that through taxes, your coverage is not dependent on your contribution and your contribution depends on your revenue.
Typically you contribute nothing if you have no revenue and you are still as much covered as the next rich guy.
That’s a huge difference. It means that you can see a doctor or have an ambulance transport you to the hospital for an expensive emergency surgery for 0€ whoever you are. And for the expensive drugs you need after that ? That’s still 0€ with no paperwork.
But to be fair, I’m exaggerating. You may have a 1€ franchise when you see the doctor.
1/3 of US medical spending could be avoided by moving to an efficient single payer system.
But, a lost of ‘waste’ is diminishing returns where there’s some benefit to the procedures preformed. It’s easy to say paying 1 million for an extra week is a poor investment, until it’s you making that decision for a loved one.
Paying 1m/week is objectively a waste when you're refusing to pay 100k for a year, though. Healthcare is paid through insurance, so there's real meat to the loved one distinction - you're not actually making that decision for your loved ones in 99.9% of cases even in the US.
You pay for healthcare in -any- system, even a completely communist/socialist system. Healthcare costs resources which much be allocated to a greater or lesser extent.
Problem with the US system is WHOM do you pay. Ultimately, to a degree perhaps greater than almost any other nation - you're paying quite a lot to stock holders, both public and private, stock holders of insurance, stock holders of pharma companies, stock holders of pharmacy companies, stock holders of EMR software (private company, Epic), and I'm sure, many other for-profit companies. Hospitals tend to be the only technically not for profits in the equation, as well as healthcare groups, but even then these groups tend to operate in a for-profit manner in service of ambitions of regional growth
Even in China you’re looking at 6% of income. Of course taxes aren’t evenly distributed, but 90k means enough income to be worth taxing without the political power to offload the tax burden on others.
You’re misunderstanding what the issues with US healthcare are.
I’ve had significant medical issues in the US and received truly excellent care without significant out of pocket costs, the same is true for many of my friends and family. There’s a reason there’s significant medical tourism to the US and from the US. However on population wide measures like life expectancy you’re better off providing basic care for 100% of the population than world class care for 40%.
There’s also major underlying issues like decades of obesity and ignorance around ‘alternative medicine’, vaccines, etc.
That is a tenancy in common 2 bedroom apartment not a house. Shared ownership of a 100+ year old building with "leased" parking 2 blocks away. Not exactly the home ownership dream.
different strokes for different folks. I can't fucking stand hearing every breath of every neighbor in a 100yr old SF house and having to tiptoe at all times so as not to upset the other tenents
Redwood City is 20 mins from Palo Alto and has a lot of houses for $1-1.5M. $3M means you are paying extra for something optional. It’s not the minimum requirement.
Lots of people are paying millions extra just to live up winding roads on a hill, where the commute is longer, and you need a geotechnical engineer to design your patio.
School quality in the Bay Area is a red queen’s race, and a pressure cooker environment is not good for the kids. Apparently the solution is grade-separating Caltrain.
I remember being a young junior engineer, my manager had just bought a nice house in the good part of town (Charleston, SC) for about 350k. We had a good “be smart with your money and this could be you too in 5 years” conversation. I think by the time I was ready to buy that house had jumped to 600k valuation, these days it’s close to $1M in valuation.
Only way to get a nice house for 300k now is to work remote in some podunk town for a big city salary.
Some anecdotal data points from a guy who lived in the Bay Area when poor people could afford Redwood City and just returned from a family event.
1. The neighborhood I grew up in in San Jose has 3, 4, or even 5 cars in front of every house. My working thesis is that despite being small, these are multi-generational homes, probably with the notional homeowners being the ones that were living there back in the mid-80s.
2. My aunt lives in a much nicer part of San Jose in the house that her husband inherited from his parents. Many of the other neighborhood homeowners are in the same situation, although there has been some flipping going on.
3. Three more boomers at the family event are all living in inherited houses, including one couple that has a pair of houses that they each inherited from their respective parents. They're not renting out the surplus, but instead have turned both into animal rescue sites.
All of these folks are grandfathered in to extremely low Prop 13 property taxes.
This a wonderful summary of the unfair dystopia that is the Bay Area real estate market.
I would also add, the forklift driver who bought the house for 40k in 1971, by state law (Proposition 13), is still paying 1971 valuation property taxes and contributing essentially nothing to local school funding, funding which is mostly covered by you according to a "new guy has to hold the bag" type scheme. In a state obsessed with fairness, a most unfair policy.
Should you wish to modify the property, conventional area wisdom is to just do so unpermitted. Boomers don't like construction because it increases supply and they want no supply, only demand, home price go brrrr. Environmentalists don't like construction because the more nature the better. Others don't like construction because they make it their business to set the vibe of the area as static and frozen. These political interests culminate in a construction permitting process that basically autorejects everything, paradoxically increasing public danger because everyone now does everything unpermitted.
Even the famously wealthy Steve Jobs ran afoul of it and couldn't buy his way out. He had a property he wanted to modify but they wouldn't let him touch it at all. So he just let it sit and rot to make a point. Ultimately the government agreed his plan was better than a rotting house.
I can’t help but miss it, even though I desperately needed to get out too.
I miss knowing where the darkest place is for 50 miles in all directions. I never got to bike highway 1 from SF to Big Sur. My boyfriend and I would have an easier time finding jobs there. There’s better roads for car enthusiasts.
There was a lot of depressing tech saturation in the Bay Area, but there’s still good pockets of the pre-software culture around there if you’re willing to live towards the edges and look for the weirdness.
5 plus years on, all that I really miss consistently is some of the food options there. Everything else you can get elsewhere, for cheaper, and in a lot of cases better. And I know I can't go back to my food options there because half the restaurants I used to like are gone and the other half have changed ownership
Are you the kind of person who refuses to go to the east bay or live next to middle class Asian Americans or Latinos? Because there are plenty of nice places for 3m 45 minutes from Palo Alto. Arguably you could get a house on the south side of the city and be 45 minutes from downtown PA by car or Caltrain.
Pitching a 45 minute commute as as something as acceptable for $3 million is insane. It has nothing to do with class. That’s a shit life driving that every day.
I've spent all my working life in jobs with the rule that the commute should not be more than 30 minutes by bike. I'm now 62, and that's one life choice I've never regretted.
