6k mortgage for a modest house in any decent area in US, 3k per kid private school, 3k other monthly expenses, 2k food: that’s already 17k/mo with just 2 kids. Plus vacations, plus setting aside at least a few thousand a month for retirement.
I can do jobs like this one but I can’t consider any job offers for less than 500k (total comp).
> Are houses and private schools cheaper in London?
They are cheaper than that everywhere in the world. I think you need to realise that you are in the upper 0.001% of earners in the world and your expenses to the rest of us seem absolutely ridiculous.
$6k per month mortgage?
My entire expenses are less than half that, I have 2 kids and I consider myself to be middle class and doing ok.
First of all, thanks for sharing numbers. I live in the UK and often hear folks from the US touting huge salaries and I figured living costs must be higher but never knew by how much.
Second, this is absolutely wild to me. Is this your monthly expenses? I live in a pretty decent sized city in the UK and my mortgage is just under 1k per month. There's no way I could even attempt to spend 2k a month on food. That said I don't send my kids to private school, the state schools in my area are very good.
The idea of earning anywhere close to 500k is utterly mind boggling to me.
Don't think of the above comment as normal. It represents perhaps .01% of Americans. The other ~99% would be just as flabbergasted after reading it as you are.
As far as income is concerned, some of us have the skills to demand that kind of comp even in the current job market, but it's rare - and more rare now than it was 2-3 years ago.
As far as expenses, it's trivially easy to slash those expenses by about a factor of 3 by living somewhere other than one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the US, and in an area with a decent public school system. 2k/month on food is also insane even for a family of 4 and implies a lot of eating out. I feed myself and my fiancée on about $450/month even buying fairly expensive ingredients, but I enjoy cooking.
Some people are just used to a certain lifestyle and are able to support it, so they consider changing it to be unthinkable. I make similar to what the person you're replying to probably makes, but my expenses are about ~$65k/year, and that includes a decent amount of spending that I consider frivolous. It would not be hard to slash another $10k/year off of that with minimal sacrifice. Not until going down toward $50k/year or below would I have to start making serious compromises.
Several millions of people in US make more than 500k, so it’s not really that rare.
$450/mo on food is probably insane for a homeless person in US, or for an average person in Uganda. Why not slash this amount to, say, $50? I’m sure you can do it if you decide to grow your own food on some remote land. Why don’t you “change your lifestyle”?
I spend 2k roughly 50/50 on groceries and eating out. Nothing fancy.
Bottom line: should I move to a shitty area, put my kids to a shitty school, and cook more (which I do not enjoy)? Why? So that whoever owns arsenal can buy an even bigger superyacht next year?
A $1.8mm 30 year fixed rate mortgage is about $12k per month at today’s rates. That wouldn’t include taxes and insurance, just the principal and interest.
It also doesn't include that a $1.8MM mortgage usually implies a $2.25MM house that you just put down $450k on.
The median price of American homes is $400k. In California it's $860k. In the Bay Area it's $1.5MM. You can get a house in the Bay Area for under $1.8MM, but you need a $360k down payment, and you will likely face a tradeoff between good schools, safe neighborhoods, being within walking distance of anything, and having a nice sized house. Outside of NYC, these numbers are the upper echelon. If you disagree, you have very expensive taste masquerading as requirements.
On that point about home sizes, Americans are frequently surprised how much less space Europeans are fine living in.
You are confusing 6k and 12k mortgages: the former is to buy a modest house today in most decent areas in the US. The latter is to buy a modest house in Bay Area, where a large fraction of hacker news users reside.
A “modest” house to me is a median house: around 2k sqft, run-of-the-mill construction, cheap materials, 8 feet ceilings, <10k sqft lot.
You’re catching flak, but I’m with you, I live in NYC and I wouldn’t even look at a job for less than $400k liquid total comp. And that would be cutting it close.
That said, people do it:
1. What constitutes a “decent area” varies from person to person.
2. My kid goes to private school (at more $5k per month), but some people live in districts where public schools are great.
3. Living in a no income tax state helps a lot too.
I could see a family being just fine on $10k per month take-home if they bought their house awhile ago, kids go to public school, they travel domestically, etc.
It’s probably a little self-aware but what he’s describing is a lifestyle attainable by people with similar jobs and qualifications as what Arsenal is asking for, and it’s reasonable to expect it if that’s what you can get from other employers.
Also, housing in much of the US is criminally expensive, and some people have unreasonably snobby attitudes about what constitutes a “decent area” in the US. Or maybe he was just making an understated and backhanded joke about the London housing market, which I’ve heard to be similarly absurd.
I live in NYC, on the UWS, in a nice (but not extravagant) 2 bedroom apartment. It’s about 1000 sq feet, and I pay $5k per month in rent. Buying a similar place in my neighborhood would cost me literally double that per month, after putting down $300k or more. My neighborhood has hundreds of thousands of people in it, all paying similar amounts (or much much more). My building has about 60 units, and I live in one of the smaller ones. Almost half of the units rent for $12k-15k per month. This is just one of hundreds of buildings in my neighborhood alone, one of thousands in Manhattan.
Of the ~350 apartments with at least 3 bedrooms for sale right in my neighborhood, only 77 cost less than $3mm. There are 52 for sale for more than $10mm, and those will almost all sell.
> The average price for a terraced house in london zone 2 is £1.7 million
I have a feeling that data is wrong. If it's accurate it's definitely been pushed up by huge outliers on the top end (like £50+M properties in Chelsea and west ken that are zone 2)
I think the median zone 2 terraced house is more like £1m, can't find a statistic but I just bought a £1.5m house in hackney and there were 10 £1-1.3m properties for every £1.7m+
