> everything that matters
I pay $1150 to lease a 1600 sqft house in Houston, and make more money than I'd make in the Bay, and control my stack instead of being a worker bee.
I pay $1150 to lease a 1600 sqft house in Houston, and make more money than I'd make in the Bay, and control my stack instead of being a worker bee.
I will never draw a Bay Area salary. But I have a great house and a kid in a good private school for <50% of the cost to live in SFO.
That is far above average.
I don't know about the 400k specifically, but I hope you might want to change your attitude: you don't need to sell for what you believe is reasonable and can imagine; you want to be selling to people who have more money than sense.
I love Austin, but it's probably arguable that its "culture" (in the art/culture sense of the word) even approaches Houston's. "Houston is one of only five cities in the United States with permanent professional resident companies in all of the major performing arts disciplines: opera, ballet, symphony, and theater"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_Houston#Arts_and_th...
And Houston is cheaper than Austin, too... but I've found Austin's tech scene to be slightly up on Houston's (if only because Austin is more compact and so getting around to the nearest meetup is a bit easier... also, Austin has a much better VC scene, but Houston does have a surprisingly large tech scene, even given that Houston is probably going to become the country's third-largest city.) http://www.businessinsider.com/r-americas-city-rankings-set-...
But bdcraven is right... modern here tends to mean .NET or Java at most of the larger Fortune 100 companies based here (mostly oil and gas, medicine, and finance.)
You'll need a lot of air conditioning and maybe a swimming pool (or two) during the summer though.