If you are a U.S based dev it is quite possible for you to gain financial independece by your mid 50s. You can then work at anything to pass the time, become a school teacher idk. For European/ROW devs the salaries are way lower and the problem is more pronounced.
Germany, if you go for big boring corporate IT in a mid-sized metro area instead of the supercool Berlin startup scene, and tune out peer pressure to take the “awesome” company lease deal on an A6/5-Series.
Not sure about SAP, but I’m on track for 55-57 with a good margin of safety. I know mostly about the IG Metall ERA Manteltarifvertrag, which covers employers like Siemens and Bosch (and mine). The levels differ by region, but at my employer in Bavaria, recent CS/MIS grads would start at EG 8 or 9, while software engineers and IT admins with a few years of experience would start at 10. A senior software engineer or data scientist would probably come in at 11 or 12, and might be able to negotiate “außer Tarif” (higher pay) if particularly sought after. After a good first year, you’re likely to get bumped up a level and/or get a performance raise of up to 28%, re-evaluated annually. Pay in Bavaria looks to be a bit higher than most other regions. You also get 30 days of vacation on top of a lot of state/federal holidays, plus extra vacation money in June and December.
Another thing that helps with retiring early here: lower base costs. We were able to buy a row house within walking distance of an U-Bahn station, which makes it easy to live with one car and possible to live without, and it will be paid off when I’m 50. Smaller cities still often have usable bus systems.
Health insurance is not the single-payer utopia some in the US make it out to be, but the public option being default puts a check on the private insurers and even full retail medical costs are usually much lower than in the US: my c-section plus 3 day hospital stay would have been about 5k EUR.
Having my “happy surprise” baby at 40 in the US would have killed my “retire at 55” dreams from fear of college costs. Here, it merely delays it a bit, because we’ll need to pay his living costs for a few more years, but not monstrous US-style tuition costs.
That’s true - we bought in late 2015, and at that point, we’d been looking for over a year and had missed out on two houses because we weren’t buying in cash and had to wait a few days to get the mortgage approved. Going by current asking prices in our neighborhood, we’d have to pay 30-40% more now.
There’s a correction in the offing, but of course, I have no idea when it will be.
