>Working in tech, you're likely able to save >50% of your earnings.
is this naivety or privilege?
is this naivety or privilege?
People in the SV/fintech sphere tend to have a really skewed idea of what typical salaries are for people "working in tech". What they really mean is "FAANG(-alike) and fintech", not "tech". They're in the third hump of the trimodal distribution of developer salaries, and may have some inaccurate ideas about the rest of the market, as a result.
(BLS gives me a median of ~$97k in 2021, if you're wondering if there's a big difference between the average and the median)
and I do agree with him, I'd rather do not have car, they're annoying and costly.
PS: I'm in Europe.
Some certainly choose to take on more expenses like living by themselves, choosing luxury housing, having a nice car, spending on nice clothes and vacations. But it’s pretty common for people to live with roommates and otherwise not “ball out” while eschewing most of that - it’s very common for tech college graduates to follow the money mustache/boglehead financial strategy of avoiding lifestyle inflation and living like college students for a while. And if you do that, you could easily have living expenses at 40k/y or less even in an expensive city like SF, Seattle, LA, NYC.
And you don’t need an outlier income to save 40k+ per year (including 401k) on 40k of expenses either. The 401k contribution limit is 22.5k. Per smartasset’s calculator, you’d only need an income of about $100k to save $40k on $40k of expenses while living in California, (that’s without employer matching while maxing 401k). And $100k is a totally reasonable figure for new grad tech TC in California.