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Comment by mdszy | Hacker News Reader

I live in a medium sized city in Wisconsin (~100k population) and my costs are:

- $850 for rent for a 2 bedroom 1200sqft apartment

- ~$70 for utilities (i have free heat so it's less in the winter and more in the summer)

and if i still had the car i previously had, my only expense would be gas (~$100/mo) and the minor maintenance it needed, which was less than $1000/yr (i tracked everything each year i had it). I bought a newer car recently and am financing it. I pay $350/mo on it and gas is closer to $200/mo for it but that's still well within the over $1000 difference in living costs.

I think you vastly understate just how insane $2100/mo for rent is, and overstate how much it costs to own a car. If $1k a month in savings isn't enough to own/maintain a car and that's a problem for you, you need a car that doesn't cost over $1k a month to own.

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Paying an extra $1.5k per month on rent isn't insane when it gets you $50 or $100k additional annual salary.

$1.5k is generous...it's more like $500-$1k maybe. I'm lucky to have my own place in SF but most people have roommates because SF rentals is mostly houses, but if you lived nearly anywhere else you'd almost certainly find your own place and not scramble to find a roommate.

So you go from paying $2k/month with roommates to maybe $1.5k/month without. Not a huge difference.

Not having roommates is 100% worth not saving a whole ton of money to me.

Fuck having roommates.

I think people in SF have normalized having roommates as adults. It's possible to find your own place, for sure, but you're going to pay at least $3500/month then for something decent unless you get a studio like me, which there are very few.

I think you may be right about normalizing roommates, which is a horrifying thought. Roommates aren't even OK in college. Past college, I can't see how it would be willingly endured. It's barely above being homeless. Being in a SRO, even the tiny cage-like ones of East Asia, would be superior.

Having a place of your own, shared only with desired family, is fundamental to being an independent adult. Ideally you should even own the land.

Here's a hot take: having roommates is actually better than living alone if they're the right roommates. (I know many people will disagree with this.)

Sure if they're great roommates it could be worth it.

But I feel like if you have roommates for financial reasons, you generally don't get the choice.

Generally speaking true, but what happens when you deduct state taxes, in a place like either California or New York. Suddenly the budget seems just about right and nothing too extravagant to write home about

What happens is you still come out way ahead. I'd dearly love to get out of the bay area, but even as a relatively low paid government contractor it's very hard to find an interesting job elsewhere that leaves more money in my pocket.

You may come out way ahead if non-local expenses are a large portion of your budget. Everybody else loses.

I'm out of the bay area, at a government contractor, with an interesting job. I can afford a huge family, currently with 14 people in the household supported on one income. Life is just easier where the houses are affordable.

I don't know what you'd consider an interesting job or what you'd qualify for, but how seriously have you looked? People can have a bias that stops them: if you allow that the interesting jobs exist, then you have to seriously consider them and ultimately act by moving, but that is a lot to think about and a lot of bother, so therefore there aren't any interesting jobs elsewhere.

Yeah it's really the startup lotto ticket. I "won" at one company, and it's big enough to justify any increase in CoL I paid to live here.

If you just want to work at the Big G then might as well move to Seattle with lower CoL and no state income tax.

But if you're purely remote you're banking that extra money

True, but most people don't have the option of Bay Area salary outside the Bay Area.

It's certainly possible I've become numb to the idea of paying $2k+ a month in rent, but as far as I'm aware this is the cost of a typical 1 bedroom in LA or Seattle and cost of a smaller studio in NYC.

The difference is the salary you can command in SF is well above the difference in cost.

1k is a studio in Seattle if you're lucky, more like 1200-1500. 1Br start in this range too.

LA, yes.

NYC, nope.

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