SF cost of living (San Jose, San Francisco: car insurance, high crime, hotels)

[BayAreaHillbilly]

Originally Posted by Lockdev

You live in a high crime area, with a roommate, have no health problems, and don't carry full coverage insurance on your car.

With the willingness to live with other people, in a high-crime area, there's not a place in the country outside of Manhattan that wouldn't be affordable for you.

For the rest of us, this place is a tad more expensive.

To put it in perspective, my mortgage for a 2500sq ft home in the most affluent section Grand Rapids was $500 less than my rent for a 1 bedroom shoebox in the East Bay.

Medical insurance rose $100/month for less coverage.
Food bill almost doubled.
Amount spent on gas/tolls nearly tripled.

I stopped going out to eat altogether here because it was too expensive.

If I didn't have family here, I'd be on the first flight out. It's too expensive for the 30-something that's thinking about the future. And that is coming from someone who works in tech and makes a nice salary.

The Inner Richmond is not a high crime area.

Well, maybe some would consider all the Tech Bros smoking weed a crime.

[Lockdev]

Originally Posted by BayAreaHillbilly

The Inner Richmond is not a high crime area.

Well, maybe some would consider all the Tech Bros smoking weed a crime.

Yeah, I misread. Thought he wrote "Richmond" in the East Bay.

[likealady]

I love how the OP ducks out because "trolls" call him out on being a top earner while also having no responsibilities and paying little for rent. Yeah we must all be crazy.

[plot]

Bringing the discussion back on cost of living (and away from income/earnings), does anyone else have an aggregate line item breakdown of their personal finances that they want to share? Additionally, I searched the web and couldn't find any websites where people share their annual personal finance summaries. Anyone know of any good websites/blogs that have this?

I do not know anyone that shares their expenses on a website but I guess I will provide mine here.

Monthly expenses:
rent: $2,200
utilities: $200
car insurance: $110
health insurance: $300
food : $400
gas: $150
internet + phone: $180
entertainment: $250

Yearly expenses:
shopping budget: $3500
emergency fund: $2500

Total: $49,000 before tax deductions, after I apply deductions my spendings is around $37,000

I do not have a roommate, I am single and under 30.

I am friends with someone (under 30) who has a mortgage and shares the property with this girlfriend, here are some of his expenses:

mortgage: $4,850 ($1150 goes to property tax)
utilities: $300
car insurance: $250
health insurance: $600
food: $650
gas: ???
internet + phone: ???
HOA: $800

yearly expenses: ???

My friend put about 40% down payment on his mortgage loan and his property is 1 million +.

I think the majority of peoples money goes into rent or mortgage. It is "expensive" because if someone in Houston Texas is making 85k a year his money is able to buy a lot more then someone in bay area California earning 130k. If you look in San Jose you can find a 1.2k sqft home go for 750k in an average neighborhood were in Houston it will go for 200k (300k if you want to be in a nice neighborhood). By the way what is expensive to one may be cheap to another person, expensive is usually relative to ones situation.

[04kL4nD]

The only thing "cheap" about living in SF is utilities and possibly transportation if you somehow rely on a monthly muni pass. That's it. I don't see how anything else could ever be cheaper than anywhere else in the country. I laugh when people tell me food in SF is cheap. Either they've never left the US where you can buy an entire sit down meal for a few dollars, or they are just used to being gouged in other cities.

[Lockdev]

Originally Posted by 04kL4nD

The only thing "cheap" about living in SF is utilities and possibly transportation if you somehow rely on a monthly muni pass. That's it. I don't see how anything else could ever be cheaper than anywhere else in the country. I laugh when people tell me food in SF is cheap. Either they've never left the US where you can buy an entire sit down meal for a few dollars, or they are just used to being gouged in other cities.

The food prices here are actually a good thing. I don't eat out here anymore because the prices are so high, which means I'm losing weight

And heaven forbid you have to rely on the BART. Cost me about $15 round trip from the East Bay to the city. I guess that isn't that bad, it can be quite entertaining.

[bodyforlife99]

I'm kinda surprised this thread ended up being 4 pages. No need to reinvent the wheel here. This isn't rocket science. There are cost of living calculators all over the internet that will confirm what most of us already know. All we need to know is what we're comparing with. There are few cities in the country that have a higher cost of living than the SF Bay Area.

I tend to look at median pricing instead of cherry picking. I hardly think the list of expenses that the OP has listed is remotely close to what the average person/family spends so no need to spend a lot of time on it. Just look to the averages (i.e. typical cost for one bedroom apartments/houses for families etc). Clearly the housing costs in the Bay Area are one of the biggest factors to consider, well above 90% of the nation. The current median in the city is $3600 for a 1 bedroom apartment. Of course if you need a 3-4 bedroom house, than that's a completely different animal.

I worked out a spreadsheet with a friend for her husband and two kids and we figured the family income needed to be roughly $176K. In the event, the couple wanted to send their kids to parochial schools when they came of age, now we're eating up all of that salary (assuming Google's average salary of $103K and both parents worked). And if they need to save up for a house, they're looking at roughly 7-8 years to get a down payment (assuming they don't move in with a nest egg).

This isn't even worth a conversation to me (I've lived in SF or Daly City for the last 50 years).

There's no spin in the world that is going to convince me that the SF Bay Area isn't one of the most expensive cities in the country.

[bodyforlife99]

My wife and I were considering moving to Austin and one of the locals shot out this comparison calculator....

Cost of living: How far will my salary go in another city? - CNNMoney

[wideworld]

Originally Posted by bodyforlife99

My wife and I were considering moving to Austin and one of the locals shot out this comparison calculator....

I used that and a couple other calculators before moving here, and my COL-adjusted salary is about 150% of what I was offered. I'm making due - not struggling, by any means - but not doing as well as where I moved from. The only reason I am able to keep my costs reasonable and still save, despite the salary, is that I downgraded my living conditions dramatically (i.e. I live in a total dump compared to the spectacular large apartments I previously lived in). It's a choice I am okay with short-term, in the interest of saving money, but I will definitely need to switch companies in order to elevate my salary enough to move into something on par with my prior units (which also sucks, because I really like where I'm at).

[Chuck5000]

Every calculator I've seen understates the cost of San Francisco Bay Area - I think most calculators do not count both home size and access to good public schools (i.e. the cost of accessing them, since they are relatively rare here) , so if one cares about either of those, avoid the calculator. It's easy enough to just look at real estate prices and salaries. But since SF proper does not have good schools, ie. the price premium does not include that, I dont know why the calculators are failing there.