| A lot to unpack in your post, but some things worth mentioning: A. Savings rate is everything. How much can you save and get compounding? If you're high earning early in your career and can keep your costs of living down, you come out way ahead. This is much easier said than done. Also a big deal in college savings—being able to put away $5k / year in a tax advantageous account for your kid(s) makes a huge difference if you can do it when they're infants. If you're not a high earner until they're in high school, it's a different scenario. 2. Have seen a lot of friends (particularly engineers) go freelance and build up consulting work while in a city like NY or SF—and then once they have stable income they move to a cheaper location. Kingston, NY in the Hudson Valley is a really interesting example of this. A small but steadily growing community of technical talent that works remote, but knows each other—making 90%+ of what they'd made in a major city and only two short hours to NYC by train or bus to meet clients, etc. And very nice housing stock in the $200-300k range. I would expect to see even more of this as we move into an age of autonomous vehicles, etc. 3. Cities. It's not clear that the party line of cities for the past decade is true. The 2008 crash did a number on younger people's ability to buy homes and finance them. They opted to stay in cities and rent instead. That trend seems to be reversing quite quickly. https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-04-18/growing-m... https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-04-03/millennia... |