[amrocha]

I don't disagree with you, but at some point the number stops mattering. What's the difference in lifestyle between 300K and 500K? 500K and 1M?

And even if there is a difference, is that worth the opportunity cost of paying everyone else a little bit better?

It's not a very popular opinion, but there should be a maximum salary imo. Beyond a certain number money is a means of acquiring power and influence, and it feels wrong to reward people with that. Set a maximum to give people something to work harder for, but without inadvertently giving individuals the power to subvert democracy through money.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

$300k - after taxes - is not buying you a lavish lifestyle of in most major cities.

It's probably not even getting you comfortably into one of the better neighborhoods, unless your partner is the bread winner.

Chicago is one of the most affordable major cities in the US - and $300k isn't gonna do more than have you comfortably living in a small condo in the better neighborhoods.

[tptacek]

Huh? $300k/yr will get you pretty much anything you want in Chicagoland. By standard consumption patterns, that's an $800k house. An $800k Chicago house is quite large. It's also a 4-bdr condo even in some parts of the Loop.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

> It's also a 4-bdr condo even in some parts of the Loop.

The average $800k+ condo in the loop is 2 bedrooms.

Sure, maybe there's a couple rare 4-bdrm's for $800k - but there's a reason they are so much cheaper...

At the moment - there does not appear to be a single 4-bedroom listed on Zillow for less than <$800k: https://www.zillow.com/the-loop-chicago-il/?searchQueryState...

In fact - there's not one listed above $800k either...

There are only 3 3bedroom condos for less than $800k - and the average HOA would adjust the price to well over $1M - making them not affordable...

I would not say if you can find 1 condo in a decent neighborhood that's semi-affordable at $300k that somehow my point is refuted that $300k - after taxes - is really not that much money...

[tptacek]

I encourage anyone who's interested in this weird claim to just go to Redfin and punch 750k-850k condo into the search, and shop around. If you're not from around here, do take note that living in the actual Loop is not something people generally do! It's the Chicago equivalent of owning a 4 bedroom condo in Nolita.

Where you'd probably actually buy, with $800k burning a hole in your pocket, is Wicker/Bucktown, Lakeview, Hyde Park or Roscoe Village. If you were price conscious, you'd buy in Lincoln Square or Jeff Park.

$800k will also buy you a pretty fantastic house in Chicago. Of course, it won't buy you a house in the Loop, because houses don't go in the Loop. When people in the HN demographic think about the parts of Chicago they think are high-status, they're not thinking like a typical house buyer, who has kids, cares about the local schools, and wants a yard. Those people are buying in Beverly, Portage Park, and Jeff Park. Houses there top out at $800k; I had a sinking feeling looking at Redfin listings there (oh shit, am I wrong about this?) untiL I realized I had to drop the lower limit way below $750k to see all the available houses.

I assume this thread is about how hard it is to survive in major American cities on $300k/yr. I think you're generally doing OK just about anywhere in the US at $300k/yr, but I assure you you're doing well in Chicago making that.

[kasey_junk]

There is a 5 bed, 3 bath 3000 sq ft Victorian on my block in Hyde Park listed at $659k that I bet will go closer to 600.

It’s in good shape, doesn’t need any major work and is in the desirable school zone.

https://redf.in/tweamI

[Eumenes]

imo, 1/3rd of that is more than enough to be 'comfortable'. Certainly enough for a small apartment or roommate situation, yearly international vacation and multiple domestic, mix of eating out (3-4 times per month) and cooking at home (packing lunches is required imo), going to a few concerts/museums/plays per month, cheap gym membership, etc. Add a spouse w/ shit income into the mix + children, okay, not good ... but those are choices ;)

[tptacek]

Sure. For upper-middle class professionals, 300k-400k feels roughly like the modal home price here. Whatever the actual mode is, an 800k house in Chicago is a very expensive place!

[bamfly]

$300k (household) isn't upper-middle, before the term became diluted to mean "middle, but with a little left over every month"—the upper-middle of Fussell's Class and The Official Preppy Handbook

- Good private school for a kid or two (guess what one of the bribes to Thomas was...). Not gonna get away with much less than $25k/yr/kid, there, and it goes up from there.

- Long vacations expensive places a couple times a year (again...)

- House somewhere nice (notably, however, the public schools can be shit, which saves a little money here)

- Country club membership, or similar

- Don't have to do, at least, the ~50% of chores you hate the most (you pay to have them done). Ditto the worst parts of childcare.

- (optional, but recommended) Attendance of fancy functions (esp. e.g. charity events–what's the point of it all if you don't feel fancy?)

- Second property with housing on it (doesn't have to be lavish, but can't be quite as shit as a hillbilly fishing shack, which even poor country folk sometimes have)

- (optional, but recommended) Any money left over after that.

That's gonna be $400k+, household, in a cheap but not crazy cheap market (who wants to be fancy in truly bum-fuck nowhere? Though your vacation property might be there...) in 2023. Bare minimum ([EDIT] that won't get you much of the "optionals", I mean, and the rest is gonna be teetering right on the edge of having to start cutting items—and then, only if you're somewhere relatively low COL).

You aren't living, to a certain social class, if you start having to sacrifice much of that. That's how you're supposed to live.

[tptacek]

I don't know anything about the broader argument here. I responded to a comment that said that $300k/yr would only get you a small place in one of the nicer neighborhoods in Chicago. That's categorically false. Mortgage calculators are premised on other expenses scaling with your housing cost, and capture the other bulletpoints ("country club membership", really?).

Someone with a $300k/yr income will end up with an extraordinarily nice home, by any standards, in Chicago.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

$800k is not getting you anything spectacular in the nicer neighborhoods in Chicago unless you're looking at 1 and maybe 2 bedroom condos.

The median condo is not particularly great - and it goes for ~$660k in most of the nicer neighborhoods.

The median house is well over $800k in the nicer neighborhoods.

And, again, Chicago is one of the most affordable cities in the US.

[tptacek]

You can just look at Redfin to see that this isn't true. You can get a 4bdr in the Loop for ~$800k. I've spent most of my life here, including the last 19 years, and I just bought a new house here; I think you're going to have a hard time talking me down from my own lived experience.

The standard message board tactic for wriggling out of this position is to define "the nice neighborhoods" in Chicago ludicrously narrowly, like the only nice places to live here are Lincoln Park and... well that's it. But even Lincoln Park is doable at $800k.

[bamfly]

> ("country club membership", really?)

Yeah, I know. I wasn't raised part of that class and don't hang out with many people in it, either :-)

Books I've read on the topic and the handful of people I know in it, yeah, that's just what you do if you're in That Set. Country clubs.

[fbdab103]

A household income of $220k puts you in the 95th percentile of income in Chicago[0]. Is the bar for comfortable that you get to rub elbows with Bezos?

[0] https://statisticalatlas.com/place/Illinois/Chicago/Househol...

[onlyrealcuzzo]

No, the bar for comfortable is being able to afford a decent place to raise a family in a decent neighborhood.

I'm not sure why we think this is only something for people who rub elbows with Bezos or for people who bought a house 10 years ago.

[amrocha]

If you don't think you can do that with 300K per year then idk what to tell you, your accounting looks very different from mine

[JumpCrisscross]

> What's the difference in lifestyle between 300K and 500K? 500K and 1M?

Pretty massive, particularly when it comes to taking vacations and bringing friends who can’t afford them with you. $300k barely permits that domestically. $1 or 2mm lets you do that comfortably all over the world. Or, alternatively, single handedly saving restaurants you love or a buddy’s small business.

[amrocha]

"Saving" a business isn't really a lifestyle thing, that's more of an investment really. Realistically, your life isn't meaningfully worse if you find a new restaurant to go to.

Paying for friends to vacation with you is a very good one though. But idk, I feel like you can extend that so far that it feels like a copout. For example, maybe you can afford a nice home on 300K, but you can't buy your mom a nice home as well. And you can't pay your brothers student loans. And you can't gift them a car every couple years.

That's not your quality of life, that's paying for someone else to live the same lifestyle as you. At that point I'd just argue for raising wages across the board so that you don't feel the need to pay your friends, they just want to go on vacation with you.

[Applejinx]

Why do you have to have ultimate power and oversight of an entire branch of government AND flit comfortably all over the world?

Shouldn't ultimate power be its own reward? That and ten times the salary of most people…

[JumpCrisscross]

> Why do you have to have ultimate power and oversight of an entire branch of government AND flit comfortably all over the world?

I don't think SCOTUS judges need a multimillion-dollar salary. Just pointing out that low single-digit millions is well below the threshold past which spending becomes performative.

[swader999]

You get into Nanny zone and hiring out all your chores with more time available.

[amrocha]

I used to that for the most part already on a third of the income (for a 2 bedroom apartment and no kids to be fair).

Biweekly maid service where they clean the dishes, the house, and do laundry. It wouldn't be much more expensive to change that to weekly and include cooking too if you wanted.

If you wanted to get a full time nanny though that's probably out of reach, but I don't understand why you even had children if you're just gonna pay someone else to raise them for you.

[swader999]

Agree, I never desired that either. I also like learning how to do repairs and renos to my house. Although I'd hire out the drywall next time.