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By the Numbers: The Highest-Paying States For Tech Professionals
Nerval's Lobster writes The average technology professional made $89,450 in 2014, according to Dice's latest salary survey. When it comes to salaries, however, not all states and cities are created equal. Those tech pros living and working in Silicon Valley are the highest-paid in the country, with an average annual salary of $112,610—but that salary grew only 4 percent year-over-year, lagging behind cities such as Portland and Seattle. Dice has built an interactive map that shows where people are making the most (and least). As you click around, note how salary growth is particularly strong in parts of the West, the Northeast, and the South, while remaining stagnant (and even regressing) in some middle states. If anything, the map reinforces what many tech pros have known for years: that more cities and regions are becoming hubs of innovation.
Salary means nothing unless you can compare it to the cost of living in each city. I would suggest a high wage in Silicon Valley is actually lower than many other areas due the the high cost of rent and real estate.
If I participated in the Mod system you would get an +1 insightful.
I would say the real metric is salary/cost of living * some base number like national average cost of living.
So Dallas TX has an average Salary of 91,674 compared to Los Angeles 95,345, however the cost of living for Dallas TX is 73.2% that of Los Angeles (according to http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/cost-of-living/ ) so that is the equivalent of 125,268 in LA. Taking what would prima facia be a 3.5k raise is really a 24% (21k) pay decrease.
Plus, I would rather live in Dallas than on the Left Coast.
No Dice...
Minor rant aside, where I live in the mid-west we are rich with tech companies but the cost of living here is oh so very cozy that ~$70,000 here probably equates to ~$140,000 in Silicon Valley and other parts of the country where the cost of living is high.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Time for a wee bit of Schadenfreude.
A married couple of tech professionals in Silicon Valley, both earning just slightly above average, $125,000 a year, . . . will qualify as "wealthy", greater than $250,000 a year, . . . and get hit by Obama's new tax policies.
The gag is that the seriously wealthy aren't worried about Obama's new tax policies, because they can afford a tax lawyer who can prove that they earn nothing.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
This can be beneficial, unless house prices are as inflated as they are now. We're at the point where you'd have to rent for over 30 years now to break even.
I'd really be interested in seeing where that's true. The average break-even point for renting vs. owning is probably 5-7 years in most areas. Some areas it may be as little as 2-3 (if rents are really high), other places it may be as much as 10 years or a little more (if rents are really low, but prices are high).
Rental markets generally adjust to housing prices over time, so it's unlikely that you could have a long-term sustainable market where you'd need to take a lot more than 10 years to break even unless it was somewhere where no one EVER sells real estate. (Such things do exist, such as in old Italian cities like Rome, where it's next to impossible to buy anything, since properties have been in the same family for centuries... but it's extremely rare in the U.S.)
And even if housing prices are inflated, interest rates are still quite low now (but may start rising). Which means that you may still be able to get an interest rate that roughly tracks inflation over the long term. Effectively, that means you're not really "paying interest" but getting a "zero interest" loan on a huge sum of money for 30 years (since you get to pay later in constant payments, which will be cheaper as inflation makes the dollars worth less). Rents, on the other hand, will rise with inflation.
Take this into account, and I sincerely doubt you'll find many places where renting makes sense for much more than 10 years.