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Comment by TrackerFF | Hacker News Reader

Obviously the salaries are quite different, but at the same time - you're pretty much walking around in golden shackles, no? I can't imagine those salaries being relevant, other than a handful of places in the US.

And for the price of a small 2-bedroom apartment in the SF-area, you can pretty much buy a mansion where I live.

Then you have things like healthcare, school costs, daycare / cost of raising a child, etc. etc.

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The US is a large place, you can save money for a decade in one location and then use that $1-2 million you built up to move somewhere cheap, buy a mansion and not give much a shit for the next 40 years. Taxes are also generally lower so you keep more. Healthcare costs don't matter since your employer pays for that and gives you good health insurance. School/child only matters later, and you can either move away by then or get promoted to making $600k+.

edit: Two engineers together can make $700k+ which is $450+k after taxes per year. After one year and reasonable spending that's enough for a down payment on a house in the Bay Area. Every single year you get enough to pay for 1.5 kid's worth of college education at a top private school. Very few costs actually matter in comparison at that point.

I grew up with a dad working for 70-120k and a mom at home. I can’t even imagine how nice the lifestyles of Bay Area kids are.

Judging by the Palo Alto train tracks - it might not be as bright as you might be imagining.

As I see it, beyond a certain level money and things don't make you much happier. They just give you a different set of things to feel the same level of happiness about.

edit: This is as someone who has experienced household lifestyles going from <$40k/year to >$250k/year.

I don't agree with you.

I've gone from 0K to 200K in my life and more money is always better, it's more freedom and it's more happiness and there has never been any downside.

Making more money has always made me happier and it's given me the ability to take care of the people I care about.

I want more and if a job comes up tomorrow that will pay me more, I'm there.

> I want more and if a job comes up tomorrow that will pay me more, I'm there.

Tere's diminishing returns on wealth accumulation. You need to give up something to make that extra more. Different people have different thresholds for "giving up" certain aspects of their life.

the parenting attitude isnt "we got it made, lets enjoy the good life", it is "i expect you to do even better". also, most kids are not the product of 750k hh income families. the median hh income is about a hundred k.

I’m really referring to the children of Googler parents.

Housing prices and the cost of any good school beyond a select few good public ones pretty much brings the lifestyle down to the same level. My friends with kids and solid incomes live comfortably but not extravagantly considering one lay-off can take your income from comfortable to 0 at a moment’s notice.

The kids you are thinking of certainly enjoy nice cars, good food, and so on.

However, the housing stock is mostly old & run down even at two million dollar prices. Not to mention, a kid with two full time Googler parents? They are attending an academically rigorous private school with 3-4 hours of cram classes after, not sipping virgin daiquiris by the pool.

350K is about enough to start considering buying a house in the bay area. Less than that and you have to make big compromises.

The life you can't imagine are all the lucky Engineers to be paid bay area salaries at reasonable cost of living locations like Seattle. You may laugh at me calling Seattle "reasonable" but compared to the bay it is.

Sure but do people want to actually want to live in those places? My wife and I both live in SF and we were able to buy a house which would be impossible now, but I don’t think we’ve ever cleared more then 250K max combined in actual salary. Now with only one of us working which could drop to zero at any moment it seems a move to cash out our equity in the house and move to Europe is a more feasible option than staying in the US

>Sure but do people want to actually want to live in those places?

I don't see why not. It's not like the Bay Area is particularly great culturally, culinarily or in most other ways. It's a giant suburb sandwiched between a medium sized city and a place that is only technically dense enough to be a city. There's plenty of mid-sized cities and suburbs in the US with reasonable costs of living.

Yeah I don’t know. I think there is a difference between places with reasonable costs of living but I don’t know if those are places where 1-2M is going to last 40yrs. I grew up in Astoria, OR with population of 10k and can say that at least compared to that place SF Bay Area is miles beyond culturally and culinarily. Even Portland seems rather lacking just in the sense that there really isn’t the amount of cultural diversity there as you can find here. I feel like if there is anything I am interested in getting into here there is almost always a club or group of people you can find here that are doing it which wasn’t always the case in other places I’ve lived. On the other hand, if you’re into things like hunting and similar recreational pursuits, the Bay Area doesn’t seem as good as other places where there aren’t as many hurdles to overcome and a lot of people are doing it as well.

I didn't mean you could retire with 1-2 million but simply you could take whatever job you wanted and not worry about major expenses. The person I was talking to mentioned kids a few times so I was talking more from that point. With kids, your free time shrinks dramatically as do your priorities. So hobbies and so on matter a lot less than good schools, stable environment, etc, etc.

In terms of diverse activities I've personally found east coast cities better and most have broader suburbs than the bay area (due to not being restricted by mountains) so it's easier to trade commute against price.

Culinarily, the Bay Area is #2 in the US, behind NYC. In Michelin star rankings it’s top 10 in the world.

Cost of living sucks, it’s why I just moved to a better COL area but damn do I miss the restaurant scene.

Most software engineers I know don't even leave the house much. What's the point of living here if you're just going to watch LoL streams all day in your bedroom?

I live on the other side of the world and my wife and I barely clear $25k

Sure, two engineers together technically can make $700k+, just like runners technically can run a 4 minute mile. You're not talking about average engineers at average companies here, so it's not really generalizable advice.

Not really. Many people earn those salaries for 5-10 years and then move literally wherever they want to raise families.

It’s not hard to save a million or more on those salaries before you turn 30. That’s a lot of freedom.

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