[adventured]

And housing is even more expensive in San Francisco than in Seattle, general cost of living is a bit higher, and CA has income taxes, adjust the figures accordingly.

The $1.3m house in Seattle will cost you $2m in SF.

Now you need $500,000 for a down payment. Your mortgage + taxes will cost you $110,000 per year, out of your $158,000 take home on a $250,000 income. You'll burn $3.8 million over 30 years on the equivalent of a typical middle-class house, before accounting for any repairs/improvements or tax increases.

You have $4,000 per month left to cover basics like: car, utilities, homeowners ins, food, home repairs, savings, life.

That's all assuming a $250,000 salary, which few people make in SF. The average is a lot closer to $200,000 total compensation, the median is even lower.

$250,000 salary is a helluva line to have to perpetually stay above for 30 years just to barely afford a modest middle-class house, while saving almost nothing besides that.

[dmode]

That's not how the math works at all. 25-30 yr olds making 250k don't live in 2m homes. They usually share an apartment in SF and pay ~$2000-2500 on rent. Then when it is time to get married or move in with a gf, you get a starter home for 500-600K, putting 10% down. Now in a couple of years, your starter home has gained $200k in value. Sell that and use the proceeds for a larger single family home around 1-1.5mn. Meanwhile, since your partner is in the Bay Area, your household income is between 400-500K. Now you are 35 and you get a couple of promotions and are either a senior Engg manager or an architect/tech lead at L6 or L7. You then start pulling 200K just in RSUs. Meanwhile your house also appreciates in value. At this point, said engineer has 300-400k in liquid savings and another 300-400k in home equity. There is a reason why people move to Seattle and SF as the math largely works out

[z0r]

That path is as rarified among software engineers at bigco as software engineering at bigco is among software engineering at large as that is to the general population.

[someguydave]

No, they move there because they hope that math works out that way, and they think they will be the one guy out of 10? 20? 100? where it actually does work out.

[pm90]

I don’t understand what is the unlikely thing to happen in the scenario described. If you’re talking about striking millions in startup exit/IPO money, I def agree with you it’s unlikely.

[z0r]

Plenty of engineers hit their cap at L5 or thereabouts (I'm sure if you look at the distribution of levels at your local bigco you'll see there's a sharp decline in numbers at some point), and not everyone is going to be part of a DINK engineering power couple.

[mythrwy]

But at this rate in 30 years that modest middle class house will be worth 2.6 billion dollars!

(kidding. I think).

[inteleng]

As is apparent here, most (software) engineers can only understand things as linear models.