I was commenting on the parent "..how far would you say that $110,000 has gotten you in Seattle?"
I've survived in Seattle making that amount, and making half that amount. Each time I've had to adjust my life in order to get what I wanted out of life.
Most Americans seem to list "house and car (in that order)" as their two biggest expenses. If someone tells you their medical expenses exceed their car expenses, it looks like an issue to me.
I'd say effectively nowhere. My lifestyle is literally identical to what it was 15 years ago when I was just starting out. It honestly feels like the goalposts keep moving. I am doing better than my parents, who were poor. I am doing worse than my grandparents, who had 8th grade educations.
I can't help but feel like you're grossly exaggerating your situation.
Convert your rent to a mortgage payment, and lock in $1,500 a month payments (probably around what you are paying in rent right now). The housing prices are only going to go up in Seattle as it becomes more of a tech city (Amazon is building an entire new office in Belltown, for example).
And you still have money leftover for a nice German car that depreciates half its value in a few years...
Perhaps you don't want to take on debt. Solid? I'd imagine your grandparents did so to build their house though as well. Also, you can even look outside of the city for cheaper real estate.
Unfortunately, $110k is becoming the new normalized "market value" for highly-qualified software engineers in America, and so the tech neighborhoods are becoming more gentrified and recalibrating their costs of living such that a six-figure salary now makes you a middle class "technocrat". I maintain that living in Seattle, SF, NYC is a "luxury" though. If you aren't happy with your standard of living in one of these luxury cities, there's nothing wrong with a place like Pittsburgh, Houston, or Cleveland where a $400k house is a mansion.
Other than that, there's a luck component to this as well. The waterfront home-owners with garaged Porsche 911s by Burke-Gillman trail in Seattle got in on the Microsoft ship early (i.e. early 90s), the company grew tremendously and they had a stake in revolutionizing the industry, and became millionaires off of their equity. The corporate life treated these Microsoft millionaires well (and chances are they had the same qualifications, skill sets, and risk aversions that you have now), but the opportunity of working at 1990 Microsoft pales in comparison to working at 2010 Microsoft. Nowadays, an entry-level job at Microsoft means having nine managers, living in an outrageously expensive area, and coding C# unit tests all day for a relative pittance. That's not to say Seattle has devolved into a SF or NYC in terms of living cost though.
How to reap the same standard of living today? Give up the cozy big corporate job (six-figures isn't as impressive in 2014 as it was in 1998), take a risk. For instance, join or found a startup that ends up becoming the next FB, invest in something like TSLA or Bitcoin a year ago. I can't say what the path to success looks like now, but I can say that it involves luck, savviness, networking, and risk-taking. Who knows? You MIGHT join the right early-stage company that grows into the next Microsoft empire (I certainly can't tell you which one), and become one of those paragons of success through following the safe corporate job route. However, you can't become complacent doing your 9-5 ASP.NET programming, or you'll never have that waterfront house.
The solution for the Microsoft millionaires of the 90s was to keep their heads to the grindstone and work up the corporate ladder, maybe even hand off to Microsoft some groundbreaking IP from their brains (for instance, the inventors of COM+, PowerShell, FAT32, PE, .NET, etc. probably own those houses). Unfortunately, this safe path no longer has nearly the same results as it did 20 years ago, and readily handing over your million-dollar brain children to a large corporation might give you a 15% raise next year in return.
This is a good comment. Of course I've seen a lot of these Microsoft effects on the area first-hand (I worked there for 5 years, well after that was any big advantage, of course). Once again though, I am not trying to say that I have it that bad. What I'm saying is that if my own situation qualifies as doing really well, then there is something very fucked up on a large scale.
I'm not sure how it is "fucked up" for you at all. Go buy that $400k house that you can afford if you don't like living in a downtown studio. You'll be among the few millennials that own houses. As it stands, you're in the top 5% of earners in the country.
If you want something more extravagant than the linked Zillow home above, then move out of Seattle and remote work out of your own $400k Pittsburgh mansion.
Sure, the weather is considerably crappier, and the locals aren't as educated as in luxury cities like SF/NYC, but you'll be relatively (in other words, extremely) well off -- cost of living is a trade-off. It's a matter of what you value.
No matter how many times I've said I'm not complaining about me, but rather using my experience as an indicator of how things must be in the big picture for many others, people just keep on responding like I'm only talking about me. Is it seriously that hard for people to think beyond self?
It totally is a lot of money. Unfortunately, everything seems to cost a lot of money these days...
Ten years ago I wouldn't have believed you if you told me I'd be spending nearly $10k a year just to get adequate health care, or over $20k a year just to have a reasonable place to live. I was thrilled when my first salaried job paid $35k/year, and couldn't understand why that barely covered my expenses! $35000 is a lot of money! $110000 is a truckload!
(Thankfully, I'm in the OP's position this year, and I earned more than I spent on essential expenses... not so much last year, though.)
For the past few years, I've managed to earn more than I've spent, and have put a good portion of that money in savings.
If I should lose my job, I've got a significant cushion to survive on.
I'm a young guy who makes approximately that much, and I feel like I'm not getting very far either.
I moved from my hometown of Winnipeg, Canada to Silicon Valley to build my career. In moving, I tripled my salary. I am definitely better off financially for having moved, but my daily quality of life is lower. Here's some food for thought:
* HOUSING QUALITY AND COST. This is, bar none, the most important aspect of my currently feeling like I'm barely getting by. In Winnipeg, if you're roommating an apartment ~30 minutes bus from downtown, your rent will be around $300/mo. 1br to yourself will set you back $500-$1000 depending where you live. The fanciest 1br penthouse I could find was $1700. Personally, I lived in a rather 'expensive', nice 1br apartment that was in a trendy, gentrifying neighbourhood about 1.5 miles from my work downtown. It cost me $850/mo and that was a luxury. I could've gotten much cheaper if I wasn't so picky about location. Compare with SF: Housing here costs a fortune. And strict rent control + high paying jobs means that the housing they do build is marketed to high income people (read: twitter millionaires). So not only is nothing available in a reasonable price range, but there are many social factors that try to make $3500/mo studios sound normal. In SF, paying a similar percentage of my take-home income as I did in Winnipeg, I get a shitty, tiny, 'jr 1 bedroom' (~400sqft) apartment nestled between a noisy road and a freeway. I can walk to work, but it's 3 miles one way, and takes me through some areas I don't feel comfortable walking alone in.
Housing cost anchors everything else. In Winnipeg I'd be paying $300/mo for what I have and where I have it; in SF I pay $1600. My salary tripled; it didn't quintuple. And because housing costs are the anchor, it makes everything else more expensive by comparison
* KEEPING UP WITH THE HIGH-POWERED JONESES. Tech has a lot of young, rich people in it. And young rich people don't always make the wisest decisions. Consequently, there's a lot of conspicuous consumption going on. I feel like I can't afford to keep up, because I'm financially disciplined and highly value long term stability. I look at other people and assume they do the same. Perhaps they don't. Maybe they're spending 50% of their disposable income on cheap glasses, expensive jeans, and cocktails with PBR in them. I spend almost 50% of my disposable (post-living-expenses) income on savings. Appearances can be misleading, and if you don't consciously keep aware of this, it can be demoralizing
* A NEW NORMAL. I would say that, proportional to cost of living, my real income has not substantially risen by moving. However, it has inflated. And inflation is a good thing when compared against uninflated prices. For example, flights. A flight from YWG to SFO costs ~$700, regardless if I live in Winnipeg ($40k income, $400/mo) or SF ($120k income, $1600/mo rent). As a result, my day-to-day standard of life hasn't increased, but my ability to do things outside of my day to day has. When I lived in Winnipeg, I was unable to take more than one flight per year, anywhere (and I usually spent it on professional develoment-related things). Now, I think nothing of dropping a few hundred dollars to fly to a conference on a weekend. The same goes for nationally-marketed goods such as electronics. My rent might've gone waaay up, but an iphone costs $800USD regardless of where I live. It's easy to overlook this, because it is not a typical everyday thing.
* LONG TERM SAVINGS. This is a little bit more important for me, since I'm paying into SS but as a non-citizen, will never collect a dime. But savings. Savings don't really have an emotional feel to them. They're not tangible, they're just some numbers on pages. If you're pumping a lot of money into savings (like I am), it can feel like that is just money that's disappearing. But nothing could be farther from the truth. Many people live in the US month-to-month, and are one crisis away from bankruptcy. My parents both grew up in households like that. Hell, my parents' households are CURRENTLY like that. I, on the other hand, am squirreling away much of my money. I'm maxing my 401k, so that in my 60s I'll be ok. I'm building up some personal savings, to achieve some personal goals (largely investment related, with the purpose of rescuing me from wage slavery). These are very important things, but they FEEL like money that just disappears
I think goalposts move by nature, even when you set them yourself. Once upon a time, my goalposts were "graduate college". Then they were, "get a good job". Then they were, "get healthy". Then, "build social circles".
These are moving goalposts. But without them, I would stagnate and achieve little.
As long as you're living your life aiming for goalposts you set, they can be achievable. The problems arise when you try to achieve someone elses goal posts.
This is a fair point of view, and I kind of agree with it, but you overlook a very important question: Is he setting all the goalposts?
If the 'goalposts' are 'live in a studio apartment, pay for health/dental care, have heat and light and hot water', and the costs of THAT keep going up, what is he supposed to do about that? Will he be happier and better off if he gets an inferior health plan to save money? Obviously not.
> If the 'goalposts' are 'live in a studio apartment, pay for health/dental care, have heat and light and hot water', and the costs of THAT keep going up, what is he supposed to do about that?
That's a very good point. If the world changes under your feet and makes it impossible to live with the quality of life you had or were aiming to have, I think your only option is to adjust your internal thinking so that you don't become unhappy.