So yeah definitely not retiring in 5 years unless you are already 55.
This also means you didn't do anything flashy or crazy with your money or lose it in markets.
Woah, woah, woah! That's more than most people in the world, the US or even California earn in a year, before taxes. (Median per capita income in California is $39k).
Why is a remote worker going to be spending roughly double the average Californian?
So making 100K in CA is the same as making $50K in Wyoming.
However, we are seeing a HUGE squeeze on cost of living in California.
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As an example, my brother bought a house in June 2020 for $327,000.
The house now Zillows for between 488K and 517K (depending on if yu believe their site, or the emails they send you.
This house was built in 1959.
My grandparents bought their house in Saratoga in 1959 for $29,000.
Sold it in ~2000 for $2,500,000.
Its now zillowing for $3,650,000.
Its almost the exact same layout as my brothers. Same build year. The only difference is that it is a 4BR and my brothers is a 3BR.
(and location...)
THe california real-estate market is literally crazy.
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But realors are an abomination. They are part of the reason (a major part) that cost of living is nuts.
Reality shows about realtors should be illegal - its market manipulation.
Look at companies like HouseCanary -- they attempted to build a ML/AI platform to inform hedgefund realtors on buying everything they could...
There should be a "protected" class of real-estate, one that cannot be purchased by hedgfunds or any individual that does NOT live in the residence. THese housing developments should be partially helped by local muni ords etc..
Budget accountability should be a thing ; SF is proposing to PAY for people from outside SF and California to COME to SF and get an abortion, such that they will pay for travel, accomodation AND procedure.
SF can't even take care of its OWN homeless folks, yet want to pay for out-of-state-abortion-medical-tourists???
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A few years ago I went thrugh the CDPH budget and read it, and looked at the salaries and employees divided by the number of homeless it claimed to be "helping"
I found that the city of SF was paying out ~$25,000 per year, per homeless person in "services"
Why not just pay those homeless people the $25,000 a year to have a city job that requires them to clean the city?
The salaries of the people that work in CDPH on the homless prblem shows the root cause
These are just anecdotes on how california is fn broken.
Why does this poster's hypothetical example of a remote worker spend double what the median Californian could? Even if they were in California, it doesn't seem unreasonable to spend what the median Californian does.
Why would someone motivated by financial concerns move to California to at all, if they can work remotely from anywhere?
These are weird numbers.
35% of 250k is not 100k. It’s 87.5. And you shouldn’t be paying 35% on 250k. 35% is the top tax rate you pay. Most of your dollars will not be taxed at that rate.
At 250k of income you should actually be paying about $70k in taxes.
But yeah, you’re not retiring in 5 years unless you’re retiring somewhere exceedingly cheap.
Also for the sake of pedantry, you still won’t be paying 35% even with California taxes. Nor could you pay over 100k even in California, so far as I can tell, unless taxes go up or there’s other income at play.
