Hacker News Reader

Comment by cjensen | Hacker News Reader

I'm a 40+ Programmer making good money with a family of five. A year ago I thought long and hard about moving away. In the end, I decided to stay because we have family here. Here's my unsolicited advice: if you are less than 30 and don't plan on being a dual-income family, move away no matter how much income you have. It makes no financial sense to live in the Bay Area: your net worth will be entirely tied to your property which is risky compared to living somewhere else and having diverse investments and savings.

The advice makes sense for the rich as well as the poor.

View on HN

> It makes no financial sense to live in the Bay Area

Until your first layoff. Then it's an absolute blessing to live somewhere where your next job is one more exit up 101.

This is the thing that everybody who works in tech forgets. If you live in Pittsburgh, Tulsa, or Lubbock, you are in for a many month job search--or you are leaving the city--when (not if) you get laid off.

Seagate had this problem a couple years ago. They wanted VLSI layout people in Pittsburgh and were offering comparable to Silicon Valley money--and nobody from the tech cities would bite. Why? Everybody knew that they were going to be the most highly paid people in the office and subject to getting axed first. And would then have to move back to Silicon Valley.

> Until your first layoff. Then it's an absolute blessing to live somewhere where your next job is one more exit up 101.

The Bay Area is not the only place with a high amount of tech jobs. Sure it may have the most but there's many other cities with plenty of openings.

Searching "software engineer" job listings on LinkedIn[1] shows:

    San Francisco (12,676)
    New York City (6,619)
    Washington D.C. Metro (5,613)
    Seattle (4,584)
    Boston (4,452)
    Chicago (3,933)
    Los Angeles (3,135)

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/job/software-engineer-jobs/

And the cost of living of most of those areas is quite high which is what people are trying to escape.

Financial sense depends on how you price the benefits of living in this area vs other areas. For example, being near family is a a benefit...so is being near people who care about technology, if that matters to you. Consider being a programmer in several startups over 5 years vs being a programmer in a large bank.

There are many houses on the market that fail or pass "rent vs buy" calculators - savings can go into diverse sources instead of a property if you so choose.

I'm of the opinion that the overall package is "worth it" here, but each person should consider their own evaluation metrics - and yes, move if you don't think it's worth it.

Note: this is certainly off-topic from the troubles of extremely poor people in this area.

But is there anywhere else where I could feasibly save ~$60k each year? I honestly don't know since I only just moved to the US but at the moment my plan is to work here for a few years, save a nice pile of money and then move somewhere affordable and less urban to raise a family.

I'm hoping to be able to save ~$240k and buy a modest house on the outskirts of Portland or Tacoma and have a little left over.

I'm just wondering if there's anywhere else where I could save money like this?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com