Comment on How much money should one person realistically make or have?

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exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

own a couple acres and a few cars

On the flip side, plenty of us don’t want to own acres or cars. None of that sounds appealing to me.

We should all figure out what is actually important to us, and where that stuff tends to be cheaper, relative to what we can earn in that place.

I like a variety of nice restaurants, a good butcher shop, good bakeries, a good coffee shop/roaster, farmers markets, and other specialty food sellers within walking (or at least biking) distance of my home. I like the option of seeing live music and standup comedians, preferably also within walking distance of my home. I like having multiple playgrounds and parks and libraries and even museums within walking distance of my home. I like that my kids can walk to and from most of these places, too.

So I pay a shitload to live in a place like that. It comes with tradeoffs: it costs more, we have less space, we can only have one car in our household. But that stuff isn’t important to me (we have money to spare, we don’t like too much space, we hate driving).

Most importantly, though, the thing I like about living in a high salary, high cost of living city is that when set aside 10% of your income for savings and 10% of your income for travel, those are types of things where a dollar is a dollar, so that 10% of a larger number goes further. Someone who lives in a big house on a big plot of land in the Midwest still has to pay the exact same amount that I would when they’re getting a hotel room in London or an Airbnb at a ski town in Colorado.

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