sometechie

You must be missed at Amazon and were a good employee. Congrats!

Care to share more about that retention bonus? Are those regularly used? Did they have a sense you’d be leaving?

I didn’t totally flush this out, but I don’t feel upper middle class in the conventional sense since I’m used to simple living. The two cars, white picket fence lifestyle isn’t me. But by raw income numbers, it certainly places me there.

It all sort of feels relative. If a “beginner” single family bungalow costs 850k+ in my neighborhood, home ownership still feels like a gamble (well, the accompanying debt burden would make me uncomfortable). A $4k mortgage payment does not sound fun if I were to lose my job, for example.

Job prospects for information workers will be far better than those in physically demanding jobs. People’s bodies give out by 50. Not completely, but enough where they can’t do physically laborious work.

The broader point of the new replacing the old is generally true (your marketability will decline by age 50), but I still see many baby boomers holding onto well paying positions for the foreseeable future. I save to hedge the risk, but I’m not too worried, since I believe the risk is over-stated.

In the spirit of this discussion, I’ll share my journey. In 2015, my base was $95k. Today, it is $150k. Including stocks and bonuses, my total compensation went from ~$140k to $220k. In California, but not the Bay Area. I hold a Bachelor’s from a pretty good university, but by no means an elite institution.

White guy from a modest background: grew up lower middle class, single mother who worked in retail, got free lunch, etc.

It feels odd to have moved and basically move up the economic totem poll to what I guess I’d call upper middle class. Life for people who stayed where I grew up is quite different than my life now.