[jedberg]

If you're making $500,000 a year anywhere on the planet and struggling you've most likely let your lifestyle get the best of you. Sure, maybe there are a few circumstances where that's not the case: a major medical bill that you're paying off, caring for your parents or other loved ones. But otherwise, there would be lots of places to cut back without a notable change in quality of life.

[blencdr]

God, this is insane. I live in France, I earn 30k€ net worth a year, my wife is 23k€ and we feel well. We're far from rich, but at no time in those last 12 months I asked myself "can I buy this ?".

Last year I had to go to the hospital for an emergency, I stayed 3 days and paied... nothing. I'm thankfull for this even if I pay for that service.

What you earn is fondamentaly dependant of the place you live. It seems like SF is quite a hard place to live.

[commandlinefan]

I find it hard to imagine making that kind of money and blowing through it all, but I do know that my wife and I put together make 3x what I would have considered more money than I would have known what to do with when I was a teenager… and we still end up every month with nothing left over.

[deadc0de]

Not in SV. $400k gets you to the lower middle class. That is you probably have a tiny chance of buying some real estate in your lifetime. House and expenses related to maintaining it is a huge chunk of change.

[p1esk]

According to [1] average income in SV is $140k, and median house price is $1.2M.

$400k income would put you into upper middle class territory.

[1] https://sf.curbed.com/2019/2/19/18229922/silicon-valley-inde...

[deadc0de]

140k is believable, but I think they mean it's per person. If you rent, it's very unlikely you'd be able to buy a 1.2M house on 140k if you started with 0 in savings.

EDIT: To clarify my previous post - I was talking about the household income.

[p1esk]

$140k is household income:

https://siliconvalleyindicators.org/data/economy/income/hous...

I agree that it might be tough to buy a median house with median income in some areas, however you can easily afford to buy a decent house almost anywhere with $400k income.

[jedberg]

Don't kid yourself. Even here in the Bay Area, $400K a year is still upper middle class. You'd be in the top 3% of earners across the nine bay area counties.

[deadc0de]

Prop 13 distorts that a lot. If you bought a house 25 years ago and now are earning 400k, yeah, you're an upper middle class.

[jedberg]

Again, you're kidding yourself. Even if you bought a new house today with no existing equity, you could easily afford $11K a month in mortgage. That's a house that's over $2M. And still have $10K a month left for other expenses.

[alphagrep12345]

Forget about buying a house part. Say the person can buy a house in texas and retire there. Would you still say it's lower middle class?

[deadc0de]

The definition of the middle class would surely depend on the cost of living in the particular area. You can make $30k and live like royalty in the 99% of the world.