Frankly the answer is expensive hobbies and/or hobbies requiring space. And "Money doesn't buy happiness" is only said by people who have enough of it to not worry.
Yeah "money is not everything" but I'd be able to do more things I like if I had house and spacious garage. But that's $$, $$$ if I also want to live in place with reasonable commute
> but I'd be able to do more things I like if I had house and spacious garage. But that's $$, $$$ if I also want to live in place with reasonable commute
My house is 2000 square feet. I have a recording studio and a wood shop and too many 3D printers. I am getting a garage permitted for another ~800 square feet. The place cost $480,000 four years ago and is around $620,000 now on Zillow. I am a fifteen minute walk from a train and can be in downtown Boston within the hour.
There are ways to get what you want other than "be an extremely unlikely curve-breaker of a success". It frequently means "not being in San Francisco or New York", granted, but...you've got options.
Are you really promoting your half a million dollar home lifestyle as the affordable and approachable way? And it appreciated how much over four years?
Im glad for you but I don't think you are making the point you intended.
It is absolutely affordable—for a software engineer. Boston salaries aren’t SF, but you aren’t going to be hurting. Other folks? No, and that’s an entirely different problem we need to be solving. That’s why tomorrow night I’m going to a town meeting to argue in favor of a new 500-unit apartment building that my neighbors don’t like. (I bought this house to live in. Add more supply, bring down those prices!)
But I don’t expect the person to whom I replied to be concerned with individually solving it either, and so while I think we can solve our own problems while being mindful of our society’s, the latter didn’t seem appropriate here.
Really? I'm in a similar situation outside of Vancouver and my house price doubled since I bought it. The salary we pay for the position that I used to purchase it went up maybe 10% in the meantime, while the financing costs went up by 100%.
You don't really need a graph to understand that change...
Good on you for fucking with the NIMBYs though, they're the reason house prices went up by an insane amount.
I haven't been out that way in years but my understanding is that Vancouver is a SF-tier disaster though, no? Huge influx of semi-speculative money into real estate.
My house, on a 30-year, 10% down, if bought today at the Zillow valuation + my property taxes and insurance, would be about $3800/month. That is absolutely not nothing, but the same square footage in Alameda, CA--a better substitute in some ways, esp. re: transit--is in the $1mil to $1.25mil range, which would be more like $7500/month (if you could make the 10% down at all).
Given that staff+ compensation in the Boston area is pretty reliably north of $200K these days, these are much friendlier numbers. And again, Boston is still an expensive area! There's lots of places in the country that are cheaper. I use Boston as an example because even on the edge of the suburbs there's still decent-to-good public transit. Go just down the road to Providence, which has a thriving local scene of its own and is still on the commuter rail to Boston but otherwise kinda lacks local public transit, and you can get a house like mine that's roughly as walkable to the basics (restaurants, supermarkets, etc.) for like $380K. And if your job is in Boston you can still be at South Station in under an hour and a half of sitting on a train that, IMO, beats BART and CalTrain pretty solidly, let alone driving (which I've known a lot of people, historically, to do from Providence--and that seemed awful).
Me, I work mostly-remote, so I'm not tied to being here in the first place. I just like it here. But realizing that there are significant options is important.
Average home price in the US is $375k. If you add a $100k-$200k to that price, a SE should be able to save and afford a house.
My hobbies take up a lot of space so I understand what you want. We had to move out of an in town location to get the house we wanted. A 1,000sqft in town house the same size as our duplex rental wasn’t going to cut it.
Luckily I was able to find jobs in an area 45 minutes away from downtown with virtual worker status (3-5 days a month in office max). I changed jobs and was able to find many other ones in the same area.
Unfortunately, in a group made up of myself and Jeff Bezos, our average net worth is $90 billion. Jeff does a lot of work in that average though. In the same way, it's very possible this person is in an area where the cost of life is absurdly high and the actual price of homes where they are is not reflected in the average, due to the dream that software engineering is massively profitable, which increases the cost of life, which makes the need for a massive salary higher, which...
This phenomenon is real, and the best way to combat it is to Go Elsewhere. I'm still in a pretty expensive spot. But I'm very comfortable having somehow managed to never work for a big-tech-payin' big tech shop.
There's a lot of great places out there. Believing that we have to all cluster around a few cities is pretty bad for us.
Why are you living in the high COL area? There are more developers working outside of Big Tech/FANG/West Coast than inside.
The West Coast does have a higher employment of Software Developers per 1,000 people. Especially SF/San Jose. Texas seems to be increasing more than other areas outside of California and Washington.
It doesn't. Money buys comfort, power, prestige, security, ..., but not happiness. A happy person is a happy person. An unhappy person is an unhappy person. It sucks in a way but from a different pov it is a wonderful equalizing fact of human experience (like the bliss of orgasm, available to poor and rich alike).
Yeah "money is not everything" but I'd be able to do more things I like if I had house and spacious garage. But that's $$, $$$ if I also want to live in place with reasonable commute