So with a 100k€ annual salary, one working parent alone can buy the house and feed the entire family. You consider that an "insult"?
Secondly, I'm genuinely interested in your thoughts here. What if you:
* Lived in the EU
* Being salaried 100k EUR (which is probably around 90th percentile)
* Worked for a _global_ company with a _global_ product deployed on a _global_ market with _global_ competition
And now some of your colleagues are from the US and you:
* have the same responsibilities as they do
* have the same skill-set needed for given position as they do
* have the same impact, or potential for it thereof, as they do
* have to go through the same agony of being and staying among top performers
And yet your US colleagues are salaried 2x-3x as much as you are. Without taking RSUs into a picture because that's a very rare thing to have in European companies.
What are your thoughts about this? Do you attribute this difference solely to the cost of living?
Also, with 2 kids and 2 adults out of which only 1 is working, you'll get heavy tax deductions, so I'd expect an effective tax rate of around 15%. That 100k€ gross will turn into 85k€ after taxes. Deduct another 10k€ annually for top-tier health insurance for everyone, 1900€ per month = 23k€ annually for the house and that leaves you with about 4300€ each month to spend on food, clothing and heating.
This might be just me, but I think if you pay people so that they can have a very nice lifestyle where they live, that's a "good salary". If the absolute $ number is higher in San Francisco than it is in Germany, then you either need to pay them more to match the lifestyle, or maybe hire in cheaper markets.
Germany in general seems to be very remote friendly. Many larger companies even have programs where you can go on a work-vacation to a tourist resort and they'll organize a co-working space and necessary permits. I guess that's why you see salaries equalize more throughout Germany while in the US the regional differences are quite strong.
Your calculus is far far from reality so your further reasoning is therefore flawed from the very start. 4-4.5k EUR is probably more realistic.
Moreover, property prices around EU are generally speaking anywhere from 3k EUR to 15k EUR per sqm. For a 100sqm home that's 300k EUR for the cheapest one, 700-800k EUR as a median and more expensive ones over a 1M EUR. Even with the 90-th percentile salary such as 4k EUR per month (after tax), how exactly do you envision buying a home with that sort of prices?
Software engineers are being grossly underpaid in Europe and all this recurring bullshit around housing prices, living costs etc. is just a bullshit that capitalist companies will spread to convince people such as yourself to start considering your colleagues as a "threat" and not just human beings who want to be paid what they are deserved.
My purchasing power, even with the 90-th percentile salary in EU, is _nowhere_ near the purchasing power I'd have with the same skills I have if I had lived in the US and that's where all the discussion can stop. If we take some of the other European countries as an example that gap is going to be even much larger. Purchasing power coefficients are a real thing you know.
So you hire someone who has 14 years of extra experience and brings a lot more value to the company and only pay them 40k extra?
That's why I'm saying it feels like an insult.
It's why we should compare salaries for positions rather than YoE.
Not in this case. It is 15 years of proper software engineering and devops experience, for times in leading positions with additional responsibilities.
The cost published does not include heating or any other utilities, that adds up pretty quick!
And yes, heating and utilities add up. But we're talking about a salary that after taxes will be 3x to 4x the down payments.
And even if it was, the legal costs alone add up to a few tens of thousands of EUR for a property like this (eg. if the property is worth €500k, you are looking at at least in the order of €50k of legal costs and taxes...). But I don't know of any bank that would lend you 100% of the price of the property you want to buy, if you do please introduce me to them...
If it really was so easy, everyone would be buying these properties. But the upfront costs are simply prohibitive.
"But I don't know of any bank that would lend you 100% of the price of the property you want to buy, if you do please introduce me to them..."
Here's a FAQ on buying a house without any prior capital. Obviously, the interest rate is going to be higher... https://www.immobilienscout24.de/wissen/kaufen/finanzierung-...
