sellindexvol66
Registered: Apr 2008
Posts: 586 |
03-01-12 02:24 PM
Quote from sle:
A family living on $350/K per year in Manhattan is not rich at all, it's solid middle class life style. Lets take myself as an example - I am making a base salary of $250k/a plus my wife is bringing home another 150k as a surgical fellow. Sounds like a lot, I am sure, but once you add the costs it's not much.
A reasonable apartment (1800 square feet with some outdoor space for my dogs) is two million dollars. That's like 8k in mortgage payments alone. Even if you are buying it for cash like i did (sheer stupidity, should have financed it), I still got to pay about 4k a month in common charges and taxes. Most of it is in post-tax money. If I had kids (in works), I'd have to pay another 30-40k per year in private school tuition, plus after school activities. A dog walker for my two puppies - probably about 1k a month, plus the vet bills plus - we are talking 15k per year. And then there is everything else, which is stupidly expensive - a gallon of milk is 5 dollars in the Fairway across the street.
Whatever comes as "comfortable salary" in the rest of the US, you'd have to double it for the NYC residents and quadruple it for the residents of Manhattan. This said, there are plenty of idiots on Wall Street that buy 300k sports cars and 20k watches and usually it's the same idiots that lose a lot of money in the subsequent years.
wait til you have kids...those private schools are just a small expense 
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