Comment by avgDev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by avgDev | Hacker News Reader

Rat race and keeping up with the Joneses.

Many individuals like to show off when they have some money. Buying expensive cars, expensive clothes, expensive dinners, expensive outings, expensive gifts....and the list goes on and on.

I am extremely comfortable around $100k. I do my own house maintenance, projects, I do my own car maintenance and repairs. We eat out here and there but nothing fancy. I am constantly doing small updates on the house and I have decent medical expenses. Every month we have money to spare, while constantly investing in 401k, S&P/Russel, bonds.

People need to turn off social media and stop buying garbage. I have met a guy making $400k a year in the banking industry prior to 2008 crash. Wife stayed home, while kids went to daycare. They cleaning ladies, and sometimes cooks to make dinner for them. Few million dollar house. After he lost his job, they lost cars, house and then divorced.

The moral of the story is it doesn't matter how much money you make but how financially savvy you are. There is a reason many professional sports players in the US "flex" during their prime years but then go broke when money dries up.

I don’t know if that’s always the case here. Look at the price of everything, and think about how people don’t just up and move when the cost of living is boiling them alive.

Folks should just move. Iowa has a 3.7% unemployment rate and is desperate for workers.

The people I went to law school with are now buying $1.5 million+ houses. Even on a $500k/year salary that's insane. My wife, who grew up in a modest household, simply couldn't pull the trigger on a mortgage like that. We moved an hour outside D.C. and bought a house for 1/3 that much.

I understand close-in houses are more expensive than they used to be, but there's also been serious lifestyle inflation among middle class millenials. I grew up in a solidly middle class household; my dad had a graduate degree and a white collar job. We ate at Sizzler, sat through the timeshare pitch to get tickets at Disney, etc. We travelled internationally just three times growing up: twice to go back home to Bangladesh, and once to Paris. Today, it seems like millenials think that just because you have a white collar job you should be able to afford an international vacation every year.

Good points, I agree.

Folks should do whatever they want to do. It is no secret that Iowa has a low unemployment rate and cheap land. But personally, I would rather be poorer and not have kids than do the type of work that is in demand in Iowa and/or deal with the quality of life there due to various reasons such as weather, geographic features, politics, etc. Not that it inherently bad, it all just depends on what one's preferences are and what tradeoffs they are willing to make.

I would even say that given some people's circumstances, and the odds they face, it might very well make sense for them to live it up in their healthy years if they feel like the probability of seeing a sufficient return on their grind is too low.

Maybe they saw their parents and families work two jobs and end up with nothing, or for whatever reason, do not have the chops to get the right credentials or learn the skills to vault them onto the next rung of the ladder. Or they were 18 to 21 and invested in an enormous amount of debt thanks to the US government's "generosity", that has very little payoff, and they figure they will never make it out of that debt.

At that point, you have already made mistakes you cannot recover from and it makes sense to just say screw it, and live for the present.

I think for some people, yeah, they wouldn’t be happy in Iowa. But pretty much top to bottom millennials are being bombarded with the idea that they need to have a college-degree required job in NYC to be happy. And I think for a lot of millennials in the middle of the spectrum, this is about adjusting expectations more than unbreakable requirements.

The fact that people are complaining about the cost of kids and housing is telling. The media glorifies the Sex in the City lifestyle, but I think most normal people once they hit their 30s want to have a family and a house. What they want in life is closer to Des Moines than Greenwich Village. It’s really hard to do that in NYC and SF, and I think our culture has done a poor job educating millennials about what alternatives are out there.

The annual mortgage on a 1.2M loan (80% of 1.5) is 70k or so. That's perfectly reasonable on a 500k/year salary. Not sure why you'd call that insane.

Yes I could also live in another country for much less. Man, why even bother, I could just live in a farm and get fed by the farm owner and not even worry about any of it.

But maybe people have preferences of what they want in life and Iowa is not it. If Iowa was many people’s dream of a location, the unemployment wouldn’t be 3.7.

The challenge with moving to another country is that you have to get the requisite visa and immigration, not to mention the cost of movement every time you want to visit the US. With States, there are open borders, which brings movement costs down considerably.

> But maybe people have preferences of what they want in life

As with everything in life, there are tradeoffs. If someone is so wedded to the idea of living in the Bay Area or New York City, then they should accept the reality that a low six-figure salary won't get them very far in terms of material benefits and creature comforts. In return, they get trendy brunch places, awesome dim sum, and proximity to Hamilton. You're right that if people prefer that, it's their prerogative, but they also can't come back and complain that they can't afford a nice big house and maybe a little more disposable income like their peers in Iowa. Ideally, these cities do more to construct housing to meet their demand, but as long as that's not happening, this is a very real tradeoff that every rational person needs to make; especially those that are privileged enough to earn $100k+ per year.

I chose to live in New York City, and fully accept all the upsides and downsides of my decision.

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