[nostrademons]

This is fairly accurate, in my experience. I live on the border between Sunnyvale and Mountain View, and within a couple blocks is a gated street (closed to vehicular traffic) where a bunch of skateboarding teens hang out. On the Sunnyvale side of the gate are a bunch of small somewhat run-down apartment buildings, usually 4- or 8-plexes, and you can never find parking because each unit often has 3-4 working adults in it. On one side of the Mountain View street are 60s duplexes; on the other are 90s duplexes; and at the end of the street is a beautiful neighborhood with $3M homes.

The one caveat, as skybrian mentions, is that you can't really judge a family's financial status from where they live. A large number of residents in the run-down areas are immigrant bargain-hunters, often with tech jobs; even the run-down areas in Silicon Valley are better than many other countries, and so they'd rather save money than flash their social status. Oftentimes it turns out that they own 3 houses and are collecting serious rent money from young American techies who think they're top of the hill in Silicon Valley.

I'm curious whether this is different from other cities. When I lived in Boston, it wasn't all that different; you'd have gorgeous restored brownstones in the South End that were a few blocks away from homicides and drug deals in Dorchester and Roxbury.

[tathougies]

To add to this, my wife and I explicitly chose to move in to a 'run-down' apartment building in order to save. Despite both of us having swanky tech jobs at the time. In fact, we conducted our apartment search mainly in spanish in order to get the best deal.

[tsunamifury]

If you're living in run-down conditions when you are earning enough to still be saving and living in decent conditions somewhere else -- you're fooling yourself. Likely your swanky tech job is netting you relatively less than you think.

[nostrademons]

Curious about your logic there? My experience has been the opposite - it's the folks who live in run-down conditions and save 50-80% of their income for decades that end up with a $5-10M net worth, while folks who live comfortably all that time leave this world with maybe a couple hundred K.

[tsunamifury]

Whats the point of dying with $10m?

What I meant is, if you are doing well you can both have nice place to live AND save. You aren't not doing well if you have to pick one or the other. Many techies seem to misunderstand their actual relative wealth in the area. Below $250k/y is lower middle, 500K/y+ is middle and 1M/y+ is upper. But everyone acts like their 300k/y makes them pocket rich while they live in a hovel.

[nostrademons]

1.) Not ever having to worry about not having enough money.

2.) Living knowing that you produced more than you consumed.

3.) Passing it on to your kids.

Anyway, from personal experience - living below your means doesn't mean deprivation. It means deciding what you actually want and not buying into all of the messages society sends you about what you should want. Usually you can get what you actually want for a small fraction of a tech-worker's salary, and then once you do that, why give the rest to somebody else?

[pianom4n]

Save a lot and retire comfortably somewhere else after 8-10 years?