[dmoy]

Yea for concrete numbers:

If you have somewhere between $5M and $10M in a HCoL American city, you are probably no longer working class insofar as you could quit, get on ACA healthcare, and rent a decent house or buy / mortgage a decent house and live a pretty comfortable life indefinitely. But you're on the very low end of not-working-class and are living a modest life (if you quit and stop drawing a salary).

If you have under that threshold (in a big expensive US city), you are probably still working class.

A lot of software engineers can get to $5M-$10M range in like 10-30 years depending on pay and savings rate. But also a lot of software engineers operate their budgets almost paycheck-to-paycheck, and will never get there.

[ath3nd]

> A lot of software engineers can get to $5M-$10M range in like 10-30

$5-$10M for 30 years, but only if you save every penny in between? Wow, that's very impressive and totally life-changing! Reminds me of the story how millennials are not able to afford buying a house because of avocado toast!

[zeroonetwothree]

I don’t see how something like 160-320k income without working is a “modest life”. By any absolute standard you have it better than almost every human that has ever lived.

[dmoy]

The caveat is stated above: in a large expensive US city where a lot of these high paying tech jobs are.

Over 50% of that $160k floor is eaten up by just housing and private or ACA insurance.

So your housing costs for like a 1k-2k sqft spot, all in (rent, or if owning then insurance, upkeep, etc) costs you something like $50k+, your health insurance for two people on ACA costs you like $40k yr assuming kids are out of the picture (more if not), and you have a decent chunk leftover to spend on living a decent life, but not like egregiously large amounts. You're not flying first class, probably not taking more than 2 big vacations a year, driving nice but not crazy expensive car, etc.

If you elect to leave the big expensive US city, then of course you can do it with substantially lower amounts (especially so long as you can swing ACA subsidies and are willing to risk your "not-working-class" existence on the whims of the govt continuing that program).

Obviously if you live in some place (read: everywhere except the US?) where the floor for medical costs of two people not working but still having income from capital isn't around $40k/yr, then the amount can go wayyyy down.