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I feel you. My brother is a restaurant manager in the middle of Kansas making 30k a year. And he is a smart guy who was a MATH MAJOR at a state school! He could come out here and get a job at a startup and make 80k easily. But he won't leave his inlaws family, so he's stuck in Kansas.

There is some strain and resentment in our relationship over our income differential, sure... especially when I want to complain that I'll never be able to afford a 1.4 million dollar house on the Peninsula because I only make 150k. It's just pointless to even bring that up to him because I know I will come off as an ass. However in some ways, he has it better than me. He and his wife bought a nice 4 bedroom rancher on a half-acre lot with an inground pool for 120k- which I will never ever be able to afford around here in my lifetime barring some unicorn ipo.

4 comments

Yea, cost of living is a big deal. I live just outside of Greenville, SC in a little town called Easley. When graduated from college I had an 1100 square foot, 2 bedroom, 2 bathroom apartment with a washer and dryer for $500 / month that was 10 minutes from downtown Greenville (beautiful, booming area - http://www.visitgreenvillesc.com/). Also have some of the cleanest water in the country, which I never really appreciated until I started watching the news.

My cousin who lives in LA heard that and told me I couldn't rent somebody's closet in LA for $500 / month. With all of the remote work opportunities, it actually kinda blows my mind that more people don't move down this way and work remote. On sheer cost of living it would be like giving yourself a huge raise.

It is slowly happening. I work remote for a large Corp. Not one based in the valley. Remote work is becoming more and more excepted, but it takes time to implement and change current mindsets.

Over the last 2 years at my company the percentage of remote workers have increased dramatically. They all used to sit in cubes, but now they sit at home on the couch.

I live in a city of about 60k with a median household income of 47k. My cost of living is low too and I tell everyone I love where I live. I couldn't imagine having an income of 100k-150k and not being able to live a nice life and not being able to afford "the American Dream".

How about $62/month for the mortgage on this 973 sq. ft. home:

http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/103-Baker-St-Cooperstown-N...

...looks pretty nice, with a good sized yard.

Wow! It's crazy how cheap that house is.

I'm simply at a loss for words...

If that mortgage is too much for you, here is a house for one tenth that ($6/month):

http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/12169-Findlay-St-Detroit-M...

...1029 sq. ft. for $1700. But if you are looking for real rock bottom prices, it is hard to beat $500:

http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/14421-Wilfred-St-Detroit-M...

...There are photos of the interior, and it looks like it is in a good neighborhood on Google Street View:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/14421+Wilfred+St,+Detroit,...

Call me impressed. I wonder what the closing costs are on a property like that.

I can guarantee you that any house for sale in Detroit with only an external picture is destroyed inside, by arson, foreclosure, vagrants, or any combination of the above, and you're going to be paying $100K+ to make it livable.

Too cold for my tastes, but same idea. :-)

Hey neighbor, just relocated from Houston to Greenville. There wasn't as much disparity between cost of living the west coasters have, but not living in a giant parking has been great for myself and my family.

No regrets. Thanks for sharing your space.

Greetings from Myrtle Beach, SC!

I moved here from Boston three years ago. I love taking advantage of the remote work environment, living in a lower cost area, and I feel Myrtle Beach is a gem, to have such low living cost, and big city amenities, due to all the summer tourists.

I was able to buy a detached single family home, 2400sqft for half the cost of my 1000 sqft Condo in Cambridge, MA - just outside Boston.

I maintain a list of remote job sites at http://LX.tc/positions - so that I can share with those I bump into, about the prospects of working remotely.

Very nice. I actually grew up just down the road from you in Florence. If you're in the Myrtle Beach area, trek down to Murrells Inlet sometime. Great seafood with an inlet boardwalk connecting a bunch of the spots to the Crazy Sister marina. The inlet walk they setup down there now has bars with local bands almost every night during the summer.

Been going down to Murrells Inlet/Garden City my whole life.

Completely off-topic, but whenever I see these amounts I feel like either I don't understand how U.S. economy works or I've been living in poverty my whole life. I'm recently graduated B.Sc in compsci and I'm doing software testing and to me 30k/year is plenty. Like I have money to buy all kind of unnecessary stuff for my hobbies. Is 30k/year really low salary in U.S.? Or am I just being under paid? I always though my family was above middle class, but I guess we've been under it or something...

The U.S. economy is geographically spread out and enormous. However, due to various historic reasons, the population is mostly focused at the coasts, and for other historic reasons, the north-west and north-eastern coastal areas are the wealthiest and densest. More people and more money means more demand and higher prices.

In the rest of the country, which is fairly sparse, you can find high standards of living, minus some of the extras you'll find in the rich, dense, coastal areas (extras usually in the form of various culture and activities). However, due to the lack of local demand, the prices are lower.

This creates hugely variable economic conditions on the order of the differences between London/Paris and Budapest.

Housing, like anywhere, dominates living expenses after taxes $30k/yr income looks more like $22k/yr. There are single bedroom apartments, not fantastic, but pretty nice, around where I live that are $2k+/mo. Now you have no money for food, transport, clothing, hobbies, etc. You can find cheaper places for around $1.5k+/mo (there are no housing options here under $1200) but that still leaves you pretty thin with $4k left to spread across the entire year for other necessities.

On the other hand, in Omaha, Nebraska, I found some comparable apartments at $500/mo. Which gives you a little more than $1k/mo for the rest of the year. You'll probably blow through half of that on food and half of that on car expenses (cheap housing in the U.S. implies almost no public transport options) and now you still have no money for savings or hobbies.

The median income in the U.S. is ~$54k/year (about the same as Europe but a hair higher). But that also means children, a couple income earners and so on.

>extras usually in the form of various culture and activities

Note that the average local more or less intentionally can't afford the time or money to visit the tourist traps. If you are not rich and want to visit the museums and galleries of Chicago, or attend a Bears game at the stadium, or a music concert, you can't live in Chicago because then you'd be too poor, you have to live elsewhere and visit.

What dense, expensive, low standard of living areas provide, is extremely dense employment. No matter how unique your job is, there's dozens to thousands of positions within walking distance of your current employer. In the more rural areas you'll see a lot more sinecure behavior, retired in place, people who've worked the same place for 20 years, nobody (such as yourself) gets promoted because the company doesn't grow and nobody quits, etc. Long term relationships are comfortable and lower stress on average, yet also less exciting and less adventurous, just like with love life.

There are also minor behavior constraints. If there's 50 companies all doing the same thing in a big city, then stack ranking basically wastes a lot of HR money pointlessly shuffling people every year, but at least its possible, whereas in a rural area especially if its a company town, stack ranking would rapidly destroy the company because the applicant pool is too small to sustain bad behavior. As a gross generalization people tend to spend far less time commuting in rural areas than urban, but the rural commute has more (high speed) miles so it is more expensive, in the city a twice a day rush hour commute might waste more than two hours of precious life per day, but at least its short therefore cheap, whereas in the country it'll be a comparatively lightning fast 30 minutes each way, but at 80 MPH and 50 cents per mile, that'll be an expensive 40 mile daily commute. City people are amazed how much rural people spend on their commute, rural people are amazed how much time city people spend on their commute.

> Note that the average local more or less intentionally can't afford the time or money to visit the tourist traps. If you are not rich and want to visit the museums and galleries of Chicago, or attend a Bears game at the stadium, or a music concert, you can't live in Chicago because then you'd be too poor, you have to live elsewhere and visit.

Ah, but that's an American perspective. In Britain museums and art galleries are generally free, for exactly this reason.

As someone who lives near Chicago, the museums have a few free admission days for Chicago residents pretty much every month (and some libraries around here let you "check out" free passes).

However, the free days are often during the weekdays and I think during work hours, so lots of working people can't really take advantage of them very often.

Maybe it varies. Last time I was in Dublin, it cost 10e to see the book of kells, the Guiness tour was 20e, etc. Almost nothing was free in Dublin. Admittedly the national art gallery was free although there was a shakedown for "donations".

Yes I know Dublin isn't a suburb of London or whatever, but culturally its not that far away.

In London most major museums are free (with a "shakedown") and have been for about 15 or 20 years. Special exhibitions tend to be charged for.

Ireland's economy and cultural sector is distinct from the UK's and much smaller. The Guinness Brewery and Book of Kells are really exceptional cases which cater to wealthy international tourists. They have little to do with local cultural life.

Chicagoland is kinda affordable though, not cheap, but compared to the other major metros is cheaper.

Roommates can make a huge difference in this math. Which is how someone actually making 30k / year can live in the same area where people 'struggle' making 100k/year. The classic tech approach of not actually cooking is also a huge money sink.

PS: You can actually just flat out save 1 million by mid 30's working for big co.

> You can actually just flat out save 1 million by mid 30's working for big co.

Yep, if you're serious about saving, this is entirely doable. I'm not at all on track for this because I'm not dedicated enough. But when I lived and worked in the bay, I knew a couple of guys who saved >50% of their take-home every year. They maxed out their 401Ks in the first few months and then redirected the money to other savings. Someone earning $100K before taxes can absolutely save a million in cash by saving aggressively for a decade and a half.

Hell, my roommate in grad school earned $30K/year and managed to save $10K one year, despite buying a (used) car. This was the result of cheap cost of living and generally just being really frugal.

>On the other hand, in Omaha, Nebraska, I found some comparable apartments at $500/mo.

This is true for Wisconsin also. I think OP is hitting the right point that many states easily allow you to live comfortably at around 30k p.a. (after taxes). It depends a lot on whether you have a family or not, party a lot or not, materialistic in general or not.

>cheap housing in the U.S. implies almost no public transport options

I am not a citizen but this isn't true for Milwaukee where I have been living for almost 2 years now. I have not needed a car because bus service is awesome and Uber (or Lyft) help me out other times. It also helps if bike tracks are good in your city, so that's another factor to lookout for.

There is also travel expenses in the U.S. that I don't think occur as frequently in Europe. For example. I have grandparents in Ohio and California. Parents in South Dakota and live in Arizona -- and my employer is in North Carolina. If I want to visit relatives for a holiday I am talking about blowing a grand minimum on airfare or gas, hotels, kenneling for the dogs, food, etc.

Yeah, I guess if your rent is ~2k/mo you can't afford it with 30k/year, but my rent is less than 200€/mo

Software testing is not software engineering. Testing generally doesn't pay as well. Be careful: if you're doing an engineer's job, then you deserve an engineer's wage. 30k/year would certainly be very low for a software engineer with a degree. For a software tester, it still appears low. According to glassdoor[0], the median US wage for a software tester is $67k. If you're making $30k, then you're probably being underpaid.

Furthermore, having money to buy unnecessary stuff for your hobbies is not the metric to go by. The more important metric is about what you're able to save. Important questions are:

* Are you saving enough money to ensure a comfortable retirement?

* Are you saving enough money to buy your children (assuming you have/will have them) a decent education?

* Are you saving enough money to cover medical expenses later in life?

* Are you able to set aside an emergency fund?

If the answer to any of those questions is "no", then you should probably be concerned.

[0] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/software-tester-salary-SR...

he/she is probably not from the US, 30k is a high enough salary in other countries.

I currently work in Finland and earn $35k/year, but granted I currently live alone in a small flat. I own older model car. I don't consume a lot of food. Which leaves me with most of my salary to spend/save as I see fit. Maybe in time I come to see lack of my salary, but for past ~4 years I only had student welfare which left me with little less than 200€/mo (~$220) after rent and stuff for food and what little hobbies I could support. So the change has been huge

As other people have said, it makes little sense comparing wages between states in the same country, even less between countries...

If I´m not mistaken, Finland has free healthcare, education and generous welfare system (that you said you benefited from, as you should), all of these should be taken into account when making comparisons, since they factor in the taxes companies have to pay for hiring people.

That said, it still seems a bit low for Finland, but ok for a recent graduate.

I did some checking after work and apparently I'm earning what Finnish Engineering Union suggests for new engineer without working experience.

Other sources aren't nearly as helpful, but they put me somewhere in the middle of all people (or something).

I'm sure some people earn more, especially closer to Helsinki, but currently I'm content with my earnings.

In Finland you have a social safety net. In the US if you're out of a job you have to pay your own health insurance, you have to keep paying down your student loans, and if you ever want to retire you should probably save and invest the money yourself.

So don't be surprised we worry about money.

I came out of school making $34k and did wonderfully. I was/am happy. After 2 years I bought a house. Making more money doesn't necessarily make life better ;)

Saw an ad for game programming job in Osaka recently. It paid $9 an hour. Not uncommon in Japan

I know at least seven years ago there were quite a few Japanese game studios that were struggling to stay afloat and thus were providing very attractive costs of development (less than half the cost of an American studio).

I was working at a video game publisher at the time and we tried to take advantage of it, being an American company but with roots in Japan, but there was some cultural and communication issues that helped lead to products that didn't sell too great and negated all benefits of cheaper development in the first place.

I wouldn't be surprised if many of those companies are still struggling today.

60k for recently graduated? I think with 5yr experience maybe and 30K for first job looks ok.

Comparing salaries across countries and regions is hard if you compare at exchange rates. It's better to use "purchasing power parity".

To a first approximation, how much house does your $30k income buy/rent you where you live?

(Even within the UK, I went from "choice of buying 2 bed flat or renting a 3 bed one" to "4 bed detached house" at the same salary by moving further away from London).

$30k is the median individual income in the U.S., and just below the average starting salary for fresh college graduates. So it's probably on the low side for someone with a B.S. in an in-demand field.

Cost of living varies a lot, but overall Americans are pretty rich in comparison to most Europeans (in the sense of being able to afford more imported Apple products made with child labor). Our median income is 35% higher than Germany and 50% higher than Finland. The flip side of that is that there is less of a safety net and having less money here is a lot harder. For example, our cheap urban neighborhoods are far more dangerous than comparable neighborhoods in most European countries.

> I'm recently graduated B.Sc in compsci and I'm doing software testing and to me 30k/year is plenty.

It really is. However in Silicon Valley cost of living is so expensive that earning 100k/year still makes you relatively not all that better off.

Where I live most of senior software engineers make around 30k/year with higher cost of living than in the US (excepting hotspots such as SV/SF/NY/...).

People who have spent their whole lives in places like California have no meaningful perspective. You get millionaires crying due to their "poverty".

Just because you have a >1,000,000 mortgage debt that sucks up a lot of your salary doesn't make you a millionaire.

Its if you have > 1 mill in liquid assets that you are a millionaire.

Poor people don't consider 1MM$ mortgages.

I bet a sv employees buying homes in the Vally who will be paying a large % of their salary on a huge mortgage feel poor.

They shouldn't. It's a rich man's privilege to buy an absurdly expensive home. Poor people don't buy expensive homes, if they manage to buy at all.

If you make six figures and are "house poor", it means you're either bad at making financial decisions or you feel the house is worth the sacrifices. Either way you aren't poor and shouldn't feel poor.

Do you remember 2004-2008? Maybe you didn't get to see it first hand, but in the US, it happened.

That's because in most of the world, poor people aren't complete idiots. Luckily, in America's rich urban and suburban areas, a thing called "credit" has been advanced, which performs the nigh-magical function of turning financially capable adults into complete idiots.

$x never seems like a lot of money after you spend it.

In a lot of metropolitan areas, a lack of home building means there are eleven people bidding against one another for ten homes. If you give all eleven people an extra $x, they'll all put it into their bids and house prices will rise by $x.

If you think software developers in SV have it bad, imagine how it must be for cleaners and food service workers in the same areas.

>If you think software developers in SV have it bad, imagine how it must be for cleaners and food service workers in the same areas.

This is what bothers me about SV devs bemoaning how high the cost of living is. The self absorption is really offputting. Oh, you can't afford a house in Palo Alto? How sad for you. The guy cleaning your table probably commutes for an hour on BART and still spends the majority of his money on rent.

I lived in the bay area for a while. I get that housing is absurdly expensive, to the point that six figures doesn't feel like a lot. It is a lot, though. Saying things like "six figures isn't really much money" is just tone deaf. You aren't poor on six figures.

I similarly have family in a rural state that make shit. On the bright side, they own/will own homes and don't live their entire lives around work. It's refreshing to go home, meet strangers, and have discussions that never mention our jobs.

On the downside, the state is economically depressed and is probably never going to get better. NAFTA plus the decimation of american car manufacturing really fucked them. My family have jobs but they don't pay well (I've bought groceries for a sibling) and it's not likely they will ever be paid even $50k/year -- enough to own a modest home, buy a car every 10 years, pay bills, and have savings -- in a relatively stable job. My brother similarly can't leave because of a joint custody agreement.

>On the bright side, they own/will own homes and don't live their entire lives around work.

Also on the downside, these wages make it impossible to ever really retire. You can't save for retirement if you area barely making ends meet. I don't know anyone working a low wage job that looks forward to doing the same job until they die.

>> However in some ways, he has it better than me.

You can too. Buy it now, and leave it. Once you are done with Silicon Valley madness you can always go back and settle there(May be even retire?).