I'm lucky to be in a well-paid job, though not unusually high for my industry and location, making a bit over 200k/year in the Bay Area in my late 20s. I have ~250k saved of which the majority is liquid, and no debt, dependents, or obligations. My SO is in a similar position (more in savings); we keep our financial lives separate.
I don't have bills because I've chosen to avoid them -- I don't have a car, I share a house with a ton of roommates so that my rent is about $1000/month, most of my nicer clothes are secondhand. He's a little more willing to blow $20 on a single bottle of wine, but one nice dinner once in a while is as fancy as we'll get.
We want to buy real estate and have kids some day, but in our area the gap between "have enough money to carry pricey handbags, drive a fancy car, and go on luxurious vacations" and "have enough money to rent an apartment with your SO", let alone "have enough money to buy a 2-bedroom house for your eventual kids" is such a huge gap. I feel like as long as I live in this prolonged adolescence of shared bathrooms and cheap rent (no worse than my grad student friends have, to be fair), my life is full of abundance. But if my boyfriend and I sign a lease for a 1br, that's about $4k/month in any location we could agree on, with painful repercussions in case our relationship ends and we have to terminate the lease. And if in the future we commit to something like trying to buy a house, a 2-br place would be in the $1.5m-2m range in our area, which would be technically affordable according to the '5 times income' rule, but feels patently absurd.
But if not on a basic home, a dog, a yard, what would I spend my money on? I'm actually at a loss; my friends and community aren't the type who would respect me more for luxury goods, I don't collect anything, my hobbies are pretty cheap. The "give up on a nice house and just get all the avocado toast" lifestyle isn't appealing. (Should I just... move???)
Would love some help thinking through this. I know I'm one of the lucky ones, but it's hard to feel that when rent is so damn high.
Submitted August 26, 2017 at 10:04PM by explots http://ift.tt/2vzbRsw
