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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). Here's a nice (affordable on 110k) house in Seattle:
http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/2809-S-Columbian-Way-Seatt... 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. |