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Scraping By On Six Figures? Tech Workers Feel Poor in Silicon Valley's Wealth Bubble (theguardian.com)
Big tech companies pay some of the country's best salaries. But workers claim the high cost of living in the Bay Area has them feeling financially strained, reports The Guardian. One Twitter employee cited in the story, who earns a base salary of $160,000 a year, said his earnings are "pretty bad", adding that he pays $3000 rent for a two-bedroom house in San Francisco. From the article: Silicon Valley's latest tech boom has caused rents to soar over the last five years. The city's rents, by one measure, are now the highest in the world. The prohibitive costs have displaced teachers, city workers, firefighters and other members of the middle class, not to mention low-income residents. Now techies, many of whom are among the highest 1 percent of earners, are complaining that they, too, are being priced out. The Twitter employee said he hit a low point in early 2014 when the company changed its payroll schedule, leaving him with a hole in his budget. "I had to borrow money to make it through the month." He was one of several tech workers, earning between $100,000 and $700,000 a year, who vented to the Guardian about their financial situation.
It's not like there aren't any other metro areas with strong tech communities. California is a great place to visit, but I'd never live there again.
Do it. I did. I thought I was banishing myself to a life of dreariness when I decided to leave the startup bubble in the Bay Area where I worked for the better part of 12 years. I worked for 2 very successful startups which are no longer startups but long term viable businesses now. I took a job in the midwest and I really thought I was actually doing it as sort of a lark or social experiment. I knew I would have a much better quality of life in terms of traffic, home I could afford, etc... I figured I would be comfortable but have no one to date, no one to hang out with, nothing to do. What I discovered was such an epic drop off in general douchiness, not just among the tech crowd but SFers in general and where I moved to. What I also found was a dating life that was amazingly more real and fulfilling that it ever was out there. People who were just much more substantial, even if not so well versed in all 12 kinds of Moroccan coffee presses. I think I was desensitized to the sheer amount of douchebags and vapid women in my every day life in the bay, both professionally and casual social circles.
The amazingly more affordable lifestyle was the was the only improvement I thought I would see, but it turned out to the be the least of the improvements I saw in my life.
I live in metro New York, another very high cost-of-living place, but slightly less insane than SV or LA. I can understand wanting to live in places where the cost is high. California has really great weather. Metro DC has a combination of extremely stable federal jobs and gov't contractor jobs that are basically like pulling money out of an unlimited ATM. New York has a very good public education system, access to a large, diverse pool of jobs and the city itself. But, I've never had the desire to move to Silicon Valley or San Francisco despite my interest in the computer field. Especially now, there's no justifying the huge cost of owning a house there or throwing away thousands a month to rent a bedroom.
Maybe I'm just not enough of a hipster to "get" startup culture -- but why would anyone other than a new college graduate want to sign up for paying a million plus for a tiny starter home that they're never in because their "all inclusive" company provides all their meals and 16 hours of work a day? Worse yet, why would anyone pay _more_ to live in San Francisco, then let their all inclusive company bus them out to the suburbs 2 hours each way?
I can definitely sympathize with the "scraping by on 6 figures" sentiment -- but the keys to living in a high cost area are living below your means, and not living where everyone else wants to live. I don't care how gentrified and hip some of the former industrial sites in Brooklyn are; there's no way I'm paying $2 million for an apartment there...I live further away where house prices are still way high but not bubble-esque. Plenty of New Yorkers pull up stakes and move to North Carolina or Texas all the time; they hate paying taxes and (IMO) don't take full advantage of the place they live in. If you're childless and don't care where your house is as long as it's huge and on 2 acres of land, then there's no reason to pay the premium. I know plenty of people that have gone from a starter home with $10K in taxes to a McMansion out in the country in a gated community with $3K in taxes. They're happy and that's fine, everyone's entitled to do what makes them happy.
I do feel like you get what you pay for though - I have 2 kids who are going to get a decent public education without paying tuition to a private school. I was asked by a former company to relocate to Florida a while back, and even the real estate agents trying to sell me on the idea agreed that I wouldn't get the same educational experience unless I shelled out for expensive private schooling.