[quote=bearishgurl]
But, there you have it. Your “peers” in SV have the potential to eventually make 2-3 times your salary but they have to make certain sacrifices to do so. [/quote]
This is the worst idea to live in the Bay area. Most average people don’t go there for the salary. The salary is only pays the bills, barely. Most people that just goes there for the salary cannot afford to own the homes there, since affordability is even less than here.
The only reason one would go there is to work for stock options with the hope that one can hit the big one or if you are going there a C-level or higher executive.
My salary up there was about 25% higher when I was there during peak bubble. That’s squat and that’s before tax. Especially these days, if you break $200k up there as an enginerd (which isn’t hard to do), you’re also subject to additional “wealth” tax at both the federal and state level, so your effective take home pay in proportion to real estate prices up there is considerably worse versus here if you are below that threshold.
It’s not possible on one salary alone for the majority of worker bees to afford living in most of the places in the bay area that is ok..The rent also will eat into most of your salary since, again, you pay rent with after tax dollars and rent is so high there.
What the bay area does illustrate is that salary is the worst way to accumulate wealth for most people (unless you are an exec). Up there, if you can’t even afford to own your own primary, good luck being able to own investment properties that generate income.
So this is where I sort of chuckle. Some of my colleagues up there that weren’t so lucky with the stock option roulette might have pretty large salaried base packages (I’d say maybe 25% more), but they have no real estate investments, limited stock they purchased themselves, the same 401k (since everyone maxes out the same), and they still rent.
Salaries pays bills. That’s it. Most people will never get ahead on salary alone.
If it wasn’t for my “luck” to go through two companies that went public and 1 that was acquired during the boom, I wouldn’t have stayed nearly as long as I did. And in hindsight, wasn’t totally screwed over by the Ericcson merger and was able to stay with Qualcomm during that time, I would have been financially much better off today.
