Cost of Living Debate

Is that really true? I saw some one-bedroom apartments there for $3500 -- expensive but even with that, 300K is a decent amoount. According to an online tax calculator, the take home pay is 185,000 or 15.4K per month.Even if you spend a bit and spend another 3K per month on stuff like food, bills, and some spending money, that's still almost 9K that you can save per month. Sounds VERY lavish to me. So lavish that in 15 years of work you could save up 1.6 million, buy a cheap house somewh

640/month is probably more than a lot of working people have left over after they've paid rent/mortgage, childcare, commuting costs. Not that it's an exorbitant lifestyle, but it's "moderately" comfortable (assuming you own your own home and qwualofy for all the relevant support).

You don't sound like you have children which means you save a lot of money that way and you guys together make a metric crap ton of money compared to the average person. Sounds like you're trying a mustachioed lifestyle. I wish you all the best. $2400/mo isn't a huge housing cost btw. Especially when living in a city.

$10K/mo is a little more than my current salary, but I would have to exclude taxes, health care for four (COBRA is a US law that lets you buy your old employer's health plan for 18 months after you leave, and at my last job it was $1800/mo), etc. I live in Chicago which isn't NYC or SF but still isn't cheap. Plus I would need more savings bc of unpredictable cash flow. Plus stress kills productivity.

You spend a total of 500 dollars a month and you don't live somewhere cheap?

That depends greatly on where you are living and on whether or not you have kids or student debt. In plenty of places a 40 or 50K salary would be burned up every month even if you never did anything crazy.

Don't think of the above comment as normal. It represents perhaps .01% of Americans. The other ~99% would be just as flabbergasted after reading it as you are.As far as income is concerned, some of us have the skills to demand that kind of comp even in the current job market, but it's rare - and more rare now than it was 2-3 years ago.As far as expenses, it's trivially easy to slash those expenses by about a factor of 3 by living somewhere other than one of the most expensiv

My expenses are about $150K a year.Fixed costs per month:* $5K mortgage* $1.2K health insurance* $300 life and disability insurance* $800 utilities* $2K home services: nanny, sitter, cleaner* $800 school / preschool and kids activities* $2K groceries, essentials, etcI have a family, two small kids (4 and 2), and live a comfortable life in Seattle. I could obviously adjust my standard of living, move somewhere cheaper, etc, but I didn't want my family

$200k if you add to this year-end taxes, cost of living, you can barely finish the month.

Well, it is technically possible he is at the national average income (not the median wage) and lives in a place where rent is way more affordable than the cities most of HN lives in. U.S. GDP per capita is $55,836.79. That is $44,558 after taxes in Knoxville, TN (I am picking a city, but it could be more extreme, he could work remotely from a rural area in the U.S. or from, say, Belize). This means 25% towards rent is $1163. So, in Knoxville, Zillow says that is a 3 bedroom home.More realist