What’s minimal salary should I target to get a desired lifestyle without accumulating debt?
In love with LA, like SFBA. Visited - know up and downsides. 0 debt, migrating from low salary/low CoL country(RU). Have work authorization. Currently middle doing seniors work full stack engineer making parts of fancy/country known banking super-app. 26M single. I have here and want to maintain same lifestyle sooner-or-later after moving: - rent and then mortgage 1/2bdr condo, no more then 1hr from work -drive mb e class, not old, can live with used or leased, but high volume and maintained well -parked close to the building -ability to eat out once in two days at cafe, not restaurant -ability to pay on a date for both persons like weekly - dress with Nike,Zara, Calvin Klein, Hilfiger. Mb fancy sneakers or ray bans like yearly. -no vacations, only visiting parents once in a year for couple days, no alcohol, no pets, no rentgirls, no drugs - okay with overtime - I sleep not much and feel well -health insured I don’t plan on investing much, or maxing pension plans. My only security will be a condo, for retirement I would like to return to home region national minority province of Russia which will always be a very very low col. of course can change my plans in couple year, but for today it’s it. #mortgage #housing #sanfrancisco #losangeles
Op you sound like me
How alike we are?) what’s your TC like? It’s it enough?
There is I like buckwheat
Yeah, drive the Mercedes, used one. And pay another mortgage to repair it monthly.... Man, adjust your values, the distribution of expenses here is very different from Russia... greatest example: wearing branded clothing here worth really close to nothing, you can always get them at places like Nordstrom Rack for few bucks $120k would be more or less enough for this is SFBA for single. With family you would need $160k
(I wrote a com before you added number, thanks for it) I know that US have tons and tons of mandatory spendings. But for example for one salary it would be a way too much spendings, for another it would be easy doable. Question is about what numbers needed to archive it. For values, I truly enjoy nice car over many other things. it’s not my core values of course, but money doesn’t buy a happy marriage for example. I would more enjoy daily drives, instead of ever equity competition. For investment I’ll better spend my extra time&money writing code and hiring freelancers to make my ideas live, then put it into some risky stocks to be burned by financial managers
Unlike Russia most of your spending for everyday living goes in housing + utilities. That’s where you spend most of your “mandatory expenditures”. The food is more expensive than in Russia, but it’s higher quality one and still, overall takes much lesser percentage of income. Shit like cars, clothing, electronics is almost negligible in overall budget. And Mercedes E is by no metric is “nice car” ;) well, at least until you step into AMG 63 territory and race it on Laguna Seca, but that would cost you whole set of tires, breaks, rotors after 1 day of racing... not sure if you meant that by “love nice cars”... You need to learn that way of living is different. The only way to learn is to try to live it by yourself. Some stuff like “parking close by” is really funny. SFBA (except San Francisco itself) is just almost country side and have no problems with parking and almost every apartment complex has plenty of parking available ;) and even offer the garages ;)
600k
At this TC he would realize that he doesn’t know where to spend all these money ;)
Only 160k for living, other 440k is for fixing the E class.
150/200k