SoCal coastal with good school districts is also pretty expensive. Are we talking about towns like La Jolla and Santa Barbara? We are taking about 2+ easily. Not that different from here. Also assuming you are not working in tech? There’s no place on earth better for a techie than RBA.
I’d rather have my kids grow up here in SV than some rando beach town in SoCal. There are far more job opportunities here and the can-do entrepreneur spirit is everywhere. Kids growing up in the Midwest really have to steel themselves to move here, with the sky high housing cost and everything. Versus kids growing up right here can just bike to google from home. I think growing up with opportunities all around you can have some very real psychological benefits.
SoCal a bit more inland and great schools is substantially cheaper than Menlo Park / Palo Alto / Los Altos. Like half the $/sq ft.
SoCal a few blocks from the coast and great schools is still a bit less expensive $/sq ft. Newport Beach, Laguna Beach, Del Mar, La Jolla.
Living right by the beach / ocean views has a totally different “location” value and premium. I love Menlo Park but it’s a joke in price compared to some of these beach locations.
Obviously the main differentiator is tech industry and cost of living. No doubt salaries are lower in SoCal and less tech jobs - which is why the land is “cheap”.
But I’m thinking this is an arbitrage opportunity for techies who maybe are in a similar position to me - good amount of cash from tech bonuses / RSUs (mostly TSLA and Bitcoin for me), and will have more job flexibility due to the Covid WFH changes.
I will not have all tech-job opportunities if I move down there, but I certainly will have a lot more remote-work options now than I would have had previously. Especially if I don’t need to maximize salary to survive (data scientists get pretty good pay even other areas).
I don’t think kids growing up in these well-to-do beach communities are lacking opportunities. I’m sure those kids are doing okay.
Sorry this thread has become like my internal monologue!
SoCal has traffic 24/7. If you don’t have to commute or ever leave town it is tolerable. But the freeways are jammed all the time. Takes an hour to go anywhere. I like San Clemente because it has less traffic than most beach towns. But even there beach parking is a nightmare.
I am sure many others are like you and they are probably thinking the same. IMO, So Cal is strong valid option. We debated the same idea for when we retire. Extra thing we are considering is our social circle. We had great friends with similar age to our kids here, so personally south bay and east bay would be our choices after PA/MV/LA.
Of course this is pandemic-era traffic, I don’t know exactly what OC traffic looks like when things are “normal”. But coastal San Diego (Del Mar, La Jolla) is fine and near San Diego’s “tech center” anyways.
We are 40. Most of our friends have moved away (ironically a lot to New York and one couple to San Diego). Our families aren’t from here so there’s not as much inertia to staying. Main reason was always our jobs. For me that really isn’t an issue anymore. So now it’s down to my wife’s job which is highly specific work at Stanford. We probably won’t make any move until she get’s sick of it or her job situation changes.
Yeah like $1600 / sq ft in Mountain View. I mean don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice house and good schools.
But are these people pulling in $600k yearly salary that they can’t get elsewhere? Or have a few million in equity / cash? If the latter, I just don’t get it. I would buy SoCal ocean front.
This. Plus, they think they can get 800k / yr if they keep at it for few more years. Many do. If you leave bay area, you’ll never find such high income elsewhere, let alone growth opportunity.
Mr. Esfahbod, who now lives in Edmonton, Alberta, and has since quit his job at Facebook, where he earned $1.5 million annually
I personally know a few. One of them is only a Research Scientist.
One of them lives in a sub $1M house(his wife is a Phd working for Google and he earns much more than his wife). Few others(including one whose wife is a gynaecologist) have multi million $ houses now(after appreciation in the last 15-20 years) , but they bought the houses dirt cheap.
If you join a unicorn startup at the right time, say about series c or even series d, you can make 600k+ as an engineer fairly comfortably and for several years. At least it’s been true the last few years. No need to work for google, fb or netflix to get paid that much.
Some folks who timed joining pinterest or snap after the stock plummeted (and then more than quadrupled) are making 1m comp easy.
They are the lucky ones. The unlucky ones are the peons working at fb, goog, appl with boring old jobs - and there are thousands of those pulling in 600k. Typically first line managers or senior eng.
Got info on this forum that currently @85% of FB employees are 4-5 years of experience(meaning the cost of salary/remuneration is low to FB for the overwhelming majority). If this is the case with a sustaining profit making company like FB, think of the ratio in companies who have yet to prove they will be profitable.
You meant 85% of FB employees are < 4-5 yrs of experience; This means 15% of 15,000 employees are > 5+ yrs of exp, which is ~2500 employees in MPK. This maps to E5~E6 and beyond. Levels.fyi states E5 is ~400k, E6 ~600k. With that income, 2M+ houses are quite comfortable.
Now, looking at homes in Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Los Altos, Mountain View, only ~1500 homes were sold in the last 12 months (including 5M+ homes). If we assume 50% of those FB employees are in the market, 2500 * 0.5 = 1250 at FB alone can nearly saturate the entire market. The correct percentage there can estimate how much impact FB has in those markets.
Goog is slightly shifted downward on the peninsula (but much bigger): PA, Mtv, LA, Sunnyvale. Apple is even more: LA/Mtv/Sunnyvale/Cupertino, etc etc. Note that FB is generally a much younger company (in terms of their employees), while others have higher percentage of employees with family.
Note: this is the general status - how BA RE has been growing in a normal year. But each year is getting some black swans; last year was Tsla, the year before that was Uber IPO, etc. These extra few 100s of millionaires would push up the competition.
