(AMA = Ask Me Anything)

Income: hourly + RSUs, so it fluctuates, but around $175k-$200k this year, $130k last year, $100k-ish per year for the 3 years before that

Expenses:

  • according to my budgeting software, 37% of my spending is on monthly bills. 84% of that is on rent. I live in a rent-controlled house in San Francisco in one of the few remaining working class neighborhoods (ie not bougie but not ghetto) with multiple roommates, and my share of the rent is $1750/mo (including utilities)

  • I also spend 9% on non-monthly bills (trips to the grocery store etc) So a total of about 46% of my spending is “baseline essential”

  • my next biggest category is labeled “goals” at 27% and includes my Roth IRA contributions, as well as money I send my parents (which is a huge chunk, 60% of that 27%) as well as large one-time expenses like a vacation (I travel about once every 2 years) and a large car maintenance that I knew was coming up

Savings percentage: difficult to say. I put 19% of my paycheck into my 401k, which is not captured by the above “spending” percentages. Also max out my Roth IRA every year (I do a backdoor Roth IRA). I also contribute $100 a week to my general-purpose emergency fund, save up monthly for things like car maintenance, vet visits, etc which I don’t know the exact amount but I know I’ll need it. The past 3 quarterly RSU bonuses I’ve gotten have gone straight into my emergency fund, but my emergency fund was largely depleted over winter when two close family issues had medical problems at the same time and were out of work.

Portfolio size: about $300k in retirement, no other savings (except emergency fund, currently sitting at about $15k)

Age: 33

  • aesthelete@lemmy.world
    2·
    17 days ago

    Not the OP, but gain a little experience and then be willing to change areas (markets). I’ve found counterintuitively that working in high cost of living (col) markets with larger salaries is better than working in low col markets where nobody is willing to pay anything.

    But my advice there might be stale as i bought a condo right before the 2020 price hikes. Being a new entry to a high priced market may no longer net the same amount of benefit. But you can run the numbers. For instance, if you move to a place where your rent doubles from 12k to 24k a year but your salary also doubles 55k to 110k, that’s losing 12k post tax to make 55k pre tax so it’s likely worth it.

    But some markets have gotten very unaffordable, so the math may not always work. High col areas often find people unwilling or unable to move into them as well which lowers the competition a little.

    I have other recommendations i could throw toward people looking to scrimp and save, but honestly none of them had as much effect on my financial life. Making more money by changing markets and job hopping made it so that i now am pretty financially stable in what’s considered a very unaffordable city.