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I see you got downvoted, but I created this throwaway because I wanted to respond, because salary is not the same depending on where you live. Mine is an extreme case, but it is a real case: I am a software engineer who used to live in the Bay Area but now live in Europe. In my country, my family is living off of a salary of 30000 (Euros, or about 36k USD). (This is my wife's salary, I'm not currently working). Our income officially puts us below the poverty line, so we pay 0% in income taxes. With this 30k, about 50% goes to housing, about 1/6 goes to special needs schooling for one of my two children (they both need it, but the younger one's school is currently free), and the remaining 1/3 is for food and bills and misc. expenses. We own a small, fuel efficient car that my wife drives while I bike or take public transportation. Our entire apartment runs on an average of 250W (servers, laptops, cell phones, electric stove) because everything is energy efficient. (LED lighting, double-pane windows, good applicances) We pay 10 euros a month for gigabit internet, 200+ channels, and unlimited calling to 150+ countries. We live comfortably in a large (100 m^2) four bedroom apartment in a safe neighborhood (working class, but nice). We eat well, we can afford to go to restaurants occasionally, and even take the occasional vacation. While we're not currently saving any money, because we have money saved up, we're not living hand to mouth, even though "technically" we are. If we wanted to return to San Francisco, the budget would look something like this: * 60k Schooling for both kids
* 60k Four bedroom apartment or split home
* 30k Food, car, bills
Once you convert that to pre-tax in SF, you're looking at about 300,000 USD gross, just to maintain the same standard of living. That's a greater than 8x disparity in cost of living, mainly because of the social net here. |