[quote=ltsdd]You’re projecting it from where you’re sitting. Try to take a moment and imagine those who toil in low-paying, manual work and let me know if they’re pursuing “happiness”. The high-paying tech sector is just that, one sector of the economy – not everyone gets paid a hefty 6-figure salary for spending half their day at work surfing the internet.
Oh…many people people I know that quit (retired from) their jobs are not sitting around at home. They all do enjoy the fact that their vacations can be as long as they want it to be and they can extend it on a whim and don’t have to worry a thing….while pursuing their happiness.[/quote]
Maybe, but low paying job and San Diego or most of the west coast does not compute. That’s the problem. People in a low paying job in SoCal just starting out, can’t afford home ownership and can barely make it affording the rent. FIRE isn’t going to work. They need to move to a lower cost area/state. The burn rate from housing alone is a lot. That’s just reality. The California economy along the coastline and the general costs associated with living along the coast is just not conducive for family counting on minimum wage/low paying jobs. That might have worked years ago when the cost of housing didn’t spiral up like it did. But it did. Short of being on federal and state subsidies, you’re hurting if you have have no subsidies and you have a low paying job here in this state because of all the fees and taxes and costs associated just to stay afloat. Take something as simple as transportation. It’s expensive for a normal middle class family just to operate and maintain a car, and in CA, not having a car is virtually not an option for most people who need to go to a job. That’s just reality. And that’s also the problem. CA can only attract people out of state who can work in those high pay and high paying jobs. In many ways, those people are BETTER being in this state versus everywhere else, because those higher paying jobs/professions generally can weather the higher costs of being here as those salaries/comps are generally tracking slightly better the increasing cost of living in CA versus other professions (not completely, but closer). That’s why we haven’t seen a massive net outflow of jobs. If you look at some of the statistics, some of the higher wage earners are moving from out state into CA where they can make more. New Jersey is one such state losing a lot of profssionals to CA.
Meanwhile, middle class in lower paying jobs will continue to be squeezed out because their costs are going up, but their future wage earning prospects are going down. These are the families leaving the state. All these payment processing, medical billing, dental billing, clerical jobs are already been transitioning out of San Diego into lower cost states because those jobs don’t really require that much special skills and can be done by people in a low cost states. San Diego use to have a pretty large number of companies that did such work.
