Waiting on a job offer, curious about cost of living (New York: apartments, purchases)
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I guess that would depend on your lifestyle and if you'd want to bunk with roommates or not. IMO 60k+ is good if you want to live on your own and maybe save a little on the side. 40-60k is probably doable if you go the roommate route.
Definitely consider the outer boroughs. You will get more for your buck as opposed to Manhattan.
I accepted a job in Manhattan many years ago for a 35% bump in pay over my Houston salary plus a rent stipend for two years. I think the stipend covered 1/3 of my UWS one bedroom apartment rent. Even with that raise, the lifestyle didn't come close to what I had in Houston. I didn't care, though.
I really wanted to come to the city so maybe didn't negotiate as hard as I could have for the move. I've been here almost 25 years and never regretted the decision.
Come work here only if you want to experience the city or/and improve your CV.
Please take the warnings here very seriously. I'm not getting the impression that you are.
It's not just the rents that are higher in NYC.
For starters here is a city income tax and a state income tax on top of regular federal income taxes. This is something you're not used to in Texas which constitutionally forbids an income tax.
The cost of living is SIGNIFICANTLY higher than Houston. Food prices are probably 50% higher (or more depending on the item), and everything else is more expensive as well- utilities, clothes, electronics, you name it.
Sales tax is 8.875 and this even applies to dumb things you wouldn't expect like yoga classes. If you smoke, how does $11 a pack sound to you? Even if you don't smoke, expect outrageous prices on items you take for granted as "affordable" in Houston.
From reading your posts I see that you're prepared for higher rents, but you're wholly unprepared for the sticker shock of how much everything else costs in NYC.
Sure you won't need a car, but the added income taxes mentioned above will eat away at any savings and then some.
Don't accept a penny less than 75k. I don't care how frugal you are, or how good you are at keeping your entertainment spending under control. If you aren't cautions you'll get suckered into a lowball salary causing an incidental drop in your quality of life- only to be fully realized after the fact.
I've lived in NYC my entire life and experienced what it's like to be in various socioeconomic brackets. I've been poor, middle class, and upper middle class in NYC (note: upper middle class is six figures in NYC, which is considered very wealthy outside of the tri-state, but not here) so I have a good idea of how much of a difference the money makes in terms of what quality of life you can expect for the salary. I'm also moving to Dallas this summer and studied the cost of living differences between NYC and Texas.
Please do not be suckered into any salary lower than 75k- and that's just an estimate without knowing what your professional trade is.
If you accept anything less, that's your choice, but be prepared for a decrease in your quality of life and make sure you have realistic expectations.
Thanks for the detailed post man. Very much appreciated.
Are prices for food really that different? I looked at a couple decent restaurants already and the prices seemed reasonable, comparable to down here.
No problem!
Yes the food prices are very different. Granted I do live in Manhattan where you find the $6 pound of butter, but I have family in the outer boroughs and from visiting the supermarkets there and also in the Dallas I noticed a huge price difference. Milk prices are regulated, but everything from chips, to veggies and bread is much cheaper in Texas. Produce was 70% less in some cases, and don't get me started on name brand cereal. While groceries in the outer boroughs is less than Manhattan is still much higher than what you're currently spending in Texas.
We've also gone out to eat in Dallas and were always astonished by how cheap everything was. A good sushi dinner for 2 (2 apps, 2 entrees) at a reasonably nice place in NYC will run a minimum of $160 including a sake and a beer. At Sushi Zushi in Southlake TX (outside of Dallas) we paid $90 for the equivalent and the portions were significantly larger. Other places we dined in Dallas confirmed the price and portion differences- Old West Cafe where you get a giant pancake/egg/sausage/grits + coffee breakfast for around $6, you really can't get something like that in NYC without spending around $10-15 and the portions are about half the size. $12 a pound for brisket at Hard 8 bbq was a bargain compared to NYC and be prepared: NYC does NOT have good BBQ. The best I know of is the Dinosaur BBQ in harlem, which would be mediocre at best by Texas standards. I blame fire codes for that, in NYC you can't have a smoker or large wood fire grill (unless the cooking structures are grandfathered-in with the premises) because you might burn down the whole city block. In short we ate at both low-priced and high priced restaurants in Dallas, and found it to be 40-50% cheaper and with much larger portions.
The only restaurants that are marginally more expensive are chains and fast food, they have a somewhat modest increase for doing business in the tri-state area. But for something simple as a ham& cheese hero with lettuce/tomato + soda from a deli you're looking at $7-$10 bucks.
I also wanted to add that we don't really have a lot of wal-marts, targets or costos inside the city limits like other places. So there's a good chance you'd have to travel pretty far away to shop at one, and without a car you can't really shop in bulk.
Anyway, while we were in Dallas we made it a point to investigate food prices at grocery stores and we thought we died and went to heaven. Every other second we were ogling at the prices, and picking up an item and going on and on about how cheap everything was. More expensive items had a smaller price gap (ex: truffle oil- these are things where you can only charge so much before people would refuse to buy them), but for everyday things the differences were staggering.
Yeah, check out Seamless.com. I use it. Some people prefer to go out, but I don't always feel like it. Take out is very hit-and-miss. Sometimes you find a good place, sometimes the food is terrible. NYC has a bit of a lack of good low-to-mid range food options. The food is great if you have a big budget, but if you just want to get a modest meal it's not easy to find a good place. The best bet is to ask your neighbors which places are good for take out, they've probably done the pre-screening work for you
Oh, sorry I misunderstood. Yes a lot of people order clothes online, I do that whenever there's an online sale. To be honest I usually order my shoes from Zappos or shoebuy unless I need something special for a black-tie occasion. By hubs orders from land's end for polos. You'll still need to crunch the numbers to make sure you're coming out ahead even with shipping charges, but lots of places drop shipping charges if you order more than a certain amount so it pays off.
There's a thread somewhere with some good pointers on saving moolah on food shopping. Fresh direct has some good bulk-meat deals, I order a motherload of bulk meat from them once a month and cram my freezer full. But their other grocery prices are too high so I get the other items from local grocery stores and farmer's markets.
Yeah, you're going to be in a dead zone for BBQ alright. We also don't have any Chik-fli-a's or Sonics, this breaks my heart.
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