From: James Rogers (jamesr@best.com)
Date: Tue May 28 2002 - 00:06:16 MDT
On 5/27/02 6:24 PM, "Samantha Atkins" <samantha@objectent.com> wrote:
> Thanks for the interesting information, James. In Silly-Con
> Valley and surrounding locales it is very difficult for a single
> adult to live on $25k, much less a family of three! Do you or
> does anyone reading this know of a good map of such areas?
> Perhaps it is time to reconsider telecommuting. My semi-single
> burn-rate in the valley is around $5K/month but $2100 of that
> goes to the ex and kids. And that is with renting part of a
> house rather than having one of my own.
It is pretty much like Mike stated: eliminate SF, Manhattan, and a few other
similarly expensive metropolitan areas and that's about it. There are many,
many cities where one can get a decent apartment for $500. In many cities,
premium neighborhoods with very nice houses top out at around $300k. If you
avoid trendy hotspots with atypically high real estate prices, you can have
something quite nice for not a lot of money. Housing costs are a primary
unavoidable living expense, so where you live can make a huge difference in
the cost of living.
While the cost of essential commodities such as food and gas in many of the
cheaper areas is similar (although almost always a little cheaper than the
expensive metros), the cost of service and facilities is very low, which
affects the price of everything you do where local service is priced into
the good you are purchasing. This translates into service oriented
industries such as restaurants being MUCH cheaper than their equivalent in
the expensive metros. When you go into the "backwater" towns and cities, you
would be hard pressed to spend more than $20 a person for a really superior
dinner.
For example, I purchased a house in the Reno area of Nevada a couple years
ago. The house was built for me semi-custom on a quarter acre lot at the
edge of a ridge overlooking the metro area almost a quarter mile below i.e.
it was a very nice lot in a fairly exclusive neighborhood (my neighbors were
a Nevada State judge and a VP of a Fortune 500). The house itself, while
not opulent, was definitely at the top of what could be considered
"middle-class". I paid $220k for it. In Silicon Valley, that won't get you
a cardboard box under bridge. Ignoring my mortgage related costs, my living
expenses at that place were somewhere around $500-700 a month, and that was
without being terribly frugal.
My current burn rate while in Silicon Valley is about $2500, with about
$1200 of that in unrelated and unnecessary expenses (e.g. paying a mortgage
for big chunks of land in Nevada). The $1200-1300 I spend a month on
relevant things such as rent ($600) allows me to live a relatively frugal
lifestyle in The Valley, and this only because I have an arrangement that
allows me to spend much less than most people in Silicon Valley. If I was
living in Nevada (I no longer own the house mentioned above), I could lead a
very comfortable lifestyle at a cost of about $1500/month for everything if
I managed my money wisely. If you burn $3k a month there you are leading a
pretty posh lifestyle as it is pretty hard to spend that much money on
living expenses.
As it happens, I too am very interested in moving back to the Reno/Tahoe
area of Nevada and rejoining the large community of Silicon Valley expats
that live there. There are some drawbacks to many of these cheaper places,
particularly if you live in and take full advantage of ultra-cosmopolitan
areas like Manhattan or San Francisco proper, but if you move into an area
with lots of expats from these areas (e.g. Reno/Tahoe with its large
population of Bay Area expats), they tend to bring many of the better things
with them as a population.
If you thoroughly investigate the myriad of cities that aren't the
cosmopolitan center of the universe, you'll actually find that they have
most or all of the things that you took advantage of in the big cosmopolitan
areas. There is kind of this myth in the cosmopolitan areas that the
backwater cities are populated with nothing but redneck hicks or blue collar
trash (with the lack of culture implied), but the reality is substantially
different though it takes on a different flavor than what you might be use
to. The various regions of the US have a far more colorful history than
most people know unless you've lived there. For example, in northern Nevada
the overwhelming identifiable cultural influence is Basque. It permeates
everything there the way the French influence permeates places like New
Orleans. There isn't a bar in northern Nevada doesn't stock large
quantities of Cuarenta Y Tres (a Spanish liquor that is used heavily in
Basque cocktails dating from around 200 B.C. and originated from a region in
modern day Spain), which was one of the many peculiar Basque things that I
was introduced to when I lived in the Reno area. Many people also don't
know that Nevada has one of the oldest and most influential Chinese
communities in the U.S. If you look through pictures of old State
Assemblies and top government officials from the 19th century, you'll see a
lot of Chinese faces (which is particularly interesting when you consider
the history of American racism against Chinese during that period that you
often hear about). Some cities are better than others, but you typically
find that the local history and culture is a lot more complex than people
who haven't lived there assume, and once you learn the ropes of your new
locale, it isn't as bad as it may seem at first.
Cheers,
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com
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