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Comment by maccard | Hacker News Reader

I've seen this sentiment posted before and it's pretty much untrue. At 120k/year, even spending 4K/month on rent, your leftover pay is still more than my gross salary. I know SF is expensive, but if you can't have a nice QOL on a the leftovers of a 120k salary, your location isn't the problem.

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$120k in SF probably amounts to take home just under $6k/mo. $4k goes to rent, so you have $2k for everything else.

That's not a great QOL. For comparison, I ran the Mexico City / SF cost of living on Numbeo[0]. $38k in Mexico City would need to be $140k in SF for comparable quality of life.

(side note -- this COL calculator is super neat! anyone have any evidence of the accuracy?)

[0] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

$2k/month is what many people I know take home after tax and before rent.

I have. it grossly underestimates.

a while ago, this and other sites said I needed 120k in LA and 140k in SF to maintain my south america 40k.

turns out I moved making more than the SF salary in LA. and it still falls short on what I have money to do on short trips and night life.

I guess it is acurate if you dont go out every friday and saturday and never, ever leave the city for the longer holidays.

So, for reference, after taxes a single person takes home what? $80k. That's about $6,666 per month, leaving $2666 after paying rent. That's not including food. Also for reference, when I lived in a South American country, rent was running about $400 a month, but even if it was $700, wouldn't you be doing better in South America? You can't ignore the fact that food and services are extraordinarily cheaper due to the lower cost of living.

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