Ask HN: How much do you save in the SF Bay Area with $120k salary? - symbolepro
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jcims
I'm going crazy trying to sort through this. Got a job offer with one of the
big bay area companies. $140K base + bonus/stock to get to $210K. Doesn't seem
like enough to move my family there from the midwest, so I'm about to say no
because I can't make it work (while saving for retirement/paying for
college/etc) on $200K per year? WTF?

~~~
nodesocket
I've lived in downtown SF for 5 years and as I type this visiting Nashville
TN, as I am thinking about moving to Nashville.

The biggest expenses to consider in SF besides the obvious housing costs:

\- Food + drink + groceries are way, way, way more expensive. There is no
Walmart in the city. Get used to corner stores that charge a hefty premium. I
miss Walmart and strip shopping malls.

\- Income taxes. Tennessee for example has 0% income state tax, excluding
dividends. The 0% state income tax in Tennessee also includes capital gains
(stocks, company selling) which is huge.

\- Health insurance. San Francisco according to my quick research using Blue
Shield retail prices are some of the most expensive in the entire United
States. I pay $500 a month for a middle of the road plan (single). That's a
car payment for a nice BMW or Mercedes. Absolutely absurd.

~~~
godot
Why not live in the suburbs of bay area (East Bay, for example), and quickly
cut 30% of your housing costs? Obviously the commute sucks (I endure it
daily), but it makes the numbers work. It boggles my mind that most software
workers think that they have to live in SF. Bonus: There's Walmart and strip
malls in the East Bay. :)

Agreed with your other points though. Not having staate income tax is a huge
bonus.

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
> It boggles my mind that most software workers think that they have to live
> in SF

Because they don't want to spend 6 hours a day commuting?

~~~
theswaagar
6 hours is kind of an exaggeration, it's more like 2 hours total which could
be well worth it

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patapscoBM
Apologies for the throwaway, and numbers are rough

$140k:

    
    
      - 1500/mo in 401k
      - 6200 after-tax, after 401k income
      - 2800 savings from after-tax income
      - Total discounted savings/mo, roughly: 2800 + .85 * 1500 = 4075
    

Is the bay area cost of living expensive? Absolutely. But I'd argue if you're
a generally frugal person you'll save more (in absolute terms) here than
anyplace else. I doubt I could get much above $100k anywhere else but NYC.

~~~
JamesBarney
In Houston sr. devs(3+ years of experience if your driven, 7 if your not) are
easily making 100k+. And most devs who are on hacker news could easily make
140k+.

~~~
bdcravens
I'll second the comment about $100k in Houston, though in general most of the
jobs are in health care or energy, and you'll find yourself doing something
like .NET or ColdFusion.

I do think you overestimate the average skill level on HN though :-)

~~~
tluyben2
What is wrong with .NET? For some reason it is not sexy here but c# and
certainly f# are great languages and large parts of the stack is open source.
Not quite sure why it is seen as something negative especially when something
like JS is seen as positive.

~~~
bdcravens
> What is wrong with .NET?

Nothing at all. I've done quite a bit of it (ColdFusion too!). Nothing wrong
with health care or energy industries either. I do think there's a lot of the
HN crowd that only have eyes for the hip languages or fun startups though,
whether it makes sense or not.

~~~
tluyben2
Let's make .NET hip again... Rise4fun, f# and yes, f* are seriously cool. For
any self professed language freak. The framework is robust, fast and now
available everywhere. I write and compile large projects on Linux and working
on a tool chain to compile iOS Xamarin on Linux.

It is very nice. And Bridge.Net is very mature as well; all our core libraries
compile with only a few injects and it is not too big either compared to what
I see most people doing online.

I do a lot of JS because legacy but it really hurts when you have such nice
languages and tools.

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tedsanders
I spend $1150 on rent. $100 on utilities. $300 on food. $150 on
transportation. Plus a few hundred for annual expenses of flying home and
buying new clothes. Adds up to a little over 20k per year.

Plenty of families in the Bay Area earn less than $120k and get by. I feel
very fortunate to earn more.

~~~
zzalpha
What's your living situation that makes $1150 per month possible? Room mates?

~~~
tedsanders
Three people in a three-bedroom apartment in Millbrae.

Craigslist shows many rooms in the Bay Area less than $1,500, though almost no
studios.

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nicolashahn
I live in San Francisco and have made 120k for the last year (just recently
got a raise to 130k). I don't have a family to support, and live with friends
renting a bedroom for 1600/mo in a 4br in Bernal Heights (I prefer to live
with people, so not having a 1br apartment downtown helps a lot).

My take home is around 77k annually and I got about 1300 back from taxes last
year. I eat out/go to bars a couple times a week, but mainly try to cook for
myself. I have a few hobbies that eat money and I end up spending a couple
hundred at least every month on them. I travel every 3-4 months, have gone to
Seattle, NY, Vancouver, LA in the last year.

With all this I've still saved somewhere between 30-35k. I also bought a
motorcycle with all the crap that comes with that (gear, insurance, parts,
etc) in that period, so if I hadn't then I'd probably have another 8k or so.

I honestly make more than enough money to live comfortably and when I moved to
the city I was only making 80k and my rent was the same. I still felt I had
enough to live comfortably but I wasn't able to save nearly as much.

120k will be fine as a single person in SF. If you have a family maybe not.

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orange_county
Make 110k, take home around 4800 month after taxes and maxed out 401k.

Rent $1600 in SF (lucky here). But I still have over $2k month after all
expenses. As a single person, I consider myself fortunate.

People will complain about living expenses but they need to calculate the
income - expenses plus what the area you want to live in. City living isn't
always a viable option for people. Whereas some people love it.

I don't think I can find any urban city that I can live in and find myself in
a situation where I can bank more than $2k a month after expenses and maxed
out 401k.

SoCal was an option for me. However I hate the suburbs, hate having a car and
the salaries for new grads were 50-80k where most rents were still at least
$1300.

~~~
zzalpha
So how does that rent compare to the mean in the area, and what are you
renting at that price? Because, as an outsider, that seems remarkably low (the
averages for SF that I can find suggest 2-3k for a studio or 1-bedroom).

Also, how does the rest of your budget break down? Math suggests $1200/mo for
all other expenses and I'm curious how that's allocated.

~~~
orange_county
Yea I have been spending a little too much. It's the moving cost and weddings
I have been attending that are killing my budget.

Yea rent for studios are between 2k-3k a month. And I'm near downtown with
only 20 minute walk to work. I live with my brother but if it wasn't for him,
I still prefer to live with other people.

Again, depends on the lifestyle that people want. I know people who want their
own place, have a car, maybe even a boat. They will have to work in places
that aren't NY or SF.

~~~
zzalpha
So room mate and no transportation costs. That context helps a lot, thanks!

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trjordan
Unfortunately, you're not going to get an exact answer here, because
everybody's lifestyle is slightly different. However, you can guess what's
going to be the big changes in your budget. I think there will be 4:

1) Your take-home pay will change. Use a calculator for you exact number, but
according to [1], a single person will take home about $6,400 / month.

2) Unless you live in Manhattan, your rent will dramatically increase. Like
everywhere, there's a huge range. Want to live in Oakland with a roommate and
bike to BART? You could probably find $1,500 / month. Want a new construction
2 bedroom downtown or close to Caltrain on the peninsula? $5,000 / month.
Houses can easily run $8,000 / month with mortgage + taxes if you can scrape
together the $300k down payment. Look around on Zillow and ballpark it.

3) Eating "nice" food out isn't cheap. There's plenty of good, cheap eats, but
if you're thinking date night, it's easy to drop $120 for 2 people then go off
and order half a dozen $8 beers. The high end is really bad -- there's a bunch
of amazing restaurants that are $75 - $100 for 6-8 courses. If you're moving
from a small city, these simply don't exist. This might be a shock if you're
used to eating at "the best place in town" for a special occasion.

4) Depending on where you are in life, there's a bunch of family-ish things
that can really eat up a budget. Dog walkers are $20 / day. Infant day care is
$2,000 / month. Getting around is kind of a pain if you don't exclusively
live, work, and play in the city, which can be fixed by giving Uber $25 /
ride. And unlike other cities, there isn't anything that's remarkably cheap
(e.g. when I lived in VA, groceries were like half the price I expected. It
was great.)

Ultimately, though, a lot of people make it work. The networking and career
attitudes in tech are unmatched (I moved from Boston at age 30), the weather
is great, and it turns out that a bunch of my friends who I thought had
disappeared had just moved out here and they all hang out.

If you're just in it for the money, it's a close call. Your best bet is to
work out here between age 22 and when you have kids, then move somewhere
affordable with the $5mil you made during that time. But that's not exactly
why I moved here -- I've learned more in the last 2 years than I thought
possible, and I've fundamentally altered the arc of my career. I may leave at
some point, but I'm glad I moved out here.

[1] [https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-paycheck-
calculator](https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-paycheck-calculator)

~~~
mnm1
$5M in 10 years at $120k? Even at $200k it's $2M before tax without living
expenses. I don't see how you get to $5M unless you're working at Google etc.
and even then it's extremely unlikely. You'd have to save half a million a
year. Where is this dream job?

~~~
icedchai
Maybe he's counting on winning the stock options lottery. Pretty unlikely,
based on my experience.

------
sjswe
At $115K, I take home about $5.5K/month, of which I save about $2.5K.

~~~
jcims
That's commendable. Would you mind breaking down your budget a bit?

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matchagaucho
It's really a housing and commute question. Living one hour away from work can
reduce cost of living by 25%.

But quality of life with that much commuting (?) :-/

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slad
Interesting comments but curious to know from the perspective of racism and
related issues. As an Immigrant from India, and Living in California (for over
10 years) at this time seems to be best bet from that perspective.

With expanding family, I have been contemplating a lot to move outside of CA
for cost saving but thoughts about racial issues plaguing the country just
makes me nervous.

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
Did you experience it yourself? I haven't heard many reports about racial
violence against Indians.

As a white person, I occasionally experienced verbal aggression from Black
people (didn't talk back, so it ended that way). I think the other way round
is more or less a taboo these days.

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simplydt
I don't live there but saw this and thought it might help (shows salaries
around the world adjusted for cost of life, I found it accurate for London and
Berlin).

[https://www.codementor.io/blog/best-cities-software-
engineer...](https://www.codementor.io/blog/best-cities-software-engineer-
earnings-271vpf599k)

~~~
JamesBarney
I can attest Houston is a great city for saving money. I was able to save
$40,000 living in a nice 1400 sq ft house in a beautiful historic
neighborhood, 5 minutes from downtown. This is while my wife was going to
school and not working, we were going out to eat and/or drinks 4-7 times a
week, and taking two week long vacation each year.

Used the savings to quit my job try and get a startup or consultancy going.

------
twobyfour
I'm shocked by some of these answers. Is SF that ridiculously expensive these
days?

For reference, I was saving 50% of take-home on a $90k salary three years ago,
living without roommates in a nice neighborhood in NYC - which isn't exactly
known for being inexpensive.

What do you spend that much money on?

------
et-al
linkregister had a conservative breakdown of a fresh graduate saving
$1k/month:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13010868](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13010868)

Numbers are from a year ago, but rents haven't increased too much since then,
and we had assumed the grad's salary was $100k.

------
maxwin
would be curious to know take home pay (120k minus tax) as well

~~~
RickS
take home at 130 was almost exactly 3k/check

housing ate 48% of my monthly income

~~~
justbaker
This is why I'm going to Southern California in the future rather than the Bay
Area. Still, housing in California..

~~~
dtang
Yeah, orange_county is right: you're not going to find much better down here
either. If you're not in Santa Monica paying bay area rent for a rundown shack
you're going to make less the further inland you go, and the rents don't get
much cheaper.

------
Maro
Hey, I was in a similar situation 2 years ago when I had a similar offer from
one of Facebook, although in the high-cost European city of London. Pros:

\- you will learn a lot at these companies

\- you will work with very smart people, which is a great experience

\- your expectations (toward yourself, your peers, the product you're working
on) will be torn apart and recalibrated at a much higher level, which is a
good thing

\- working on products that are used by 100s millions / billions of people is
a positive human experience because you're helping give people services that
improve their lives (buying books so they can learn to program, building
products so they can keep in touch with their loved ones, helping them find
information on the web, etc.)

But, keep in mind:

\- these are big companies, so the peopleware is slow: getting promoted takes
time and depends on a myriad of factors outside your control; don't _count_ on
it [in the first 2 years]

\- the signing/relocation bonus won't be around in year#2, so dependending on
how much of a refresher you get, you could make less in year#2

\- stock prices fluctuate! it could go down 30% (as well as up 70%) in the
next 9 months; as a rule of thumb, make sure your base salary covers living
expenses

\- as a rule of thumb, assume your refresher grant will be 1/2 of the initial
stock grant, and has the same vesting schedule; use Quora to get more details
on your specific company, or ask a friend who works there

\- be sure to use the correct tax rates (also for stocks) when net'ing the
offer numbers (look out for federal and state taxes, income vs cap.gains)

\- if you're a software engineer, the offer numbers seems a bit low vs your 20
years of experience for SV, esp. the stock part

\--- either this company pays less than others or they're under-leveling you

\--- if you care, ask your recruiter what level they put you at

\--- there's rational reasons for these big tech companies to under-level
people with lots of experience, which is that they have their own internal
stack and ways of doing things, plus they're very good at spinning people up
in their bootcamp programs, so they don't care _that_ much about prior
experience

\- if you take the offer, you will probably soon meet people at the company
(or in SV) who are doing roughly the same job as you are, are a _lot_ younger,
but have _significantly_ better packages because they had better signaling
(went to top uni, had competing offers); depending on who you are, this may
end up bothering you

Another thing to consider: many of these companies also have offices in the
US, but outside of SV, eg. Seattle, Washington, Texas, NYC, where I believe
they offer roughly the same packages, but cost of living / commutes are much
more reasonable.

Good luck!

