Edit: Sorry, to be more explicit: by global standards large swaths of Americans DO live pre-WWII lives and have poorly constructed homes and lifestyles.
my personal experience suggests that cost of living vs living standards is pretty uniform globally if compared on a national level. (at least in the places i have been to. higher cost of living in a country always also meant higher living standards, and vice versa. differences only mattered within a country with popular locations being more expensive, and there mostly it affects the cost for homes.). so your idea that raising poor families to $2500/mo would make them wealthy is only true if they don't try to change their living standards.
and what does that have to do with international economics being based on exploitation? again, that's an interpretation of the things we can see here. i don't disagree with the interpretation, it's just that the photos do not themselves make the interpretation, they only observe.
You can live a perfectly comfortable life on that; you don't have to worry about bills or medical expenses, and you can afford to get a mortgage and buy a house (probably costing around $300k or so)
That's why I'm surprised about people from a richer nation saying they can't afford things.
If you had the same salary in Switzerland or Luxembourg which, believe it or not, is not impossible, there would be a lot of items that you can't afford. Salary is important but cost of living matters as well. Granted, inside the same country, figures could change drastically but people tend to live where there are lots of job opportunities where it's more expensive.
In developed countries, people buy (or rent) the things they need. Most financial transactions are recorded, taxed, regulated, and with 3rd parties involved at every step (who also expect to get payed). Car insurance, home insurance, electrical bill, etc etc. Grocery prices go up, you pay more. Renting, and rents are raised? Tough.
But in less-developed countries it's not rare for people to grow their own food. They could be living on 0 income & still have food on the table. Swap produce & services with other people in town. No 3rd parties, no taxes (see: informal economy). Build their own home on family-owned land. Insurance? What insurance?
TLDR; there's many flavours & angles on what "poor" or "rich" means in practice.
High salaries and an industry boom over the last decade created a sort of whiny arrogance amongst software developers, and particularly those of Silicon Valley. They desperately want to see themselves as the elite.
Of course the elite get their mansion where they want. They are entitled to it.
Meanwhile people making $50000/month in San Francisco can't afford a house because half of it is taxed away and housing is astronomically expensive.
When you have a highly inelastic supply (constrained by zoning laws, density limits, and geographical boundaries), prices rise to the maximum margin of what the highest-income buyers are capable of paying.
Regarding taxes: Since taxes apply to all local high-earners equally, it doesn't change their relative purchasing power against one another in the local housing market. If taxes were suddenly halved, that extra liquidity would be priced into the next bidding war, driving home prices even higher.
When half that $50K gets taxed, half of what's remaining has to be saved up for retirement in a place that deeply discriminates against age, you don't have much left to save up for buying a $2M house.
Edit:
So the numbers are not a direct exchange rate to USD.
Q: How were dollar values assigned to households? A: The households’ door numbers represent the consumption values (US dollars) that each adult in the household has per month. This figure comes from a combination of the household’s self-reported consumption and income levels. We then checked the official cost of living data in each country to adjust the values for purchasing power parity (PPP) and converted the value into US dollars. Read more about how we assigned the Dollar Street values here.
I'm not familiar with the situation in San Francisco. But in Santa Cruz, the cost to own with a 20% down payment is ~50% higher than the rent for the same unit. If you can't afford a substantially higher down payment, you're not really in the market for a home.
With $7k/month after tax, you would probably be renting an 1br, or maybe a cheap 2br. But your income is not high enough to buy anything, unless you start looking for homes well outside the town.
To pay off 300k within 30 years at current mortgage interest of 4% you'll have to pay 1432/month (215k of interest will be necessary)
Depending on the amount of taxes you have to pay, thats likely > 50% of netto wage
* in an area not going to get shot or mugged
* structurally earthquake safe so that we don't die
They fix the toilet for $200, I need to earn $400 to have that $200, and the toilet repair person gets to keep $100 after their taxes.
$400->$100 in one go. Government keeps $300. Make that make sense.
Buying a $2M house is saving for retirement. Owning your own home in retirement is a massive financial win. And if you own a home in an expensive market, you can sell it, buy one in a more affordable market, and then the difference is unlocked retirement savings.
It is true that the marginal rate can be very high, though, so heuristics based on pre tax income break down at these numbers. The place we live in costs $7k/mo but to buy it we’d have to spend $450k and then $9.5k/mo.
Yes, lots of households make that much, especially people at e.g. Nvidia with unvested appreciated RSUs.
Yes, the US economy is that badly fucked.
And the people on mortages were brainwashed into buying something they can't afford, and in for a foreclosure disaster when the economy corrects.
60K per month will pay a 4.5 million dollar mortgage. 4.5 million will buy you some of the nicest houses in the bay that aren't mansions. See:
https://www.realtor.com/news/unique-homes/midcentury-modern-...
You are either insane, or out of touch in a way that makes you insane. Of course, you can get a much cheaper very nice condo and "safely" squirrel away phenomenal amounts of cash savings. Expecting to own a high end house in a dense metro are on its own, is a pretty insane expectation.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/80-Prentiss-St-San-Franci...
check this out.
I think OP is overselling the point, but not by nearly as much as people think.
The effective tax would be about 26%.
Federal: 1240 + 0.12 * (50400 - 12401) + 0.22 * (105700 - 50401) + 0.24 * (201775 - 105771) + 0.32 * (256225 - 201776) + 0.35 * (640600 - 256226) + 0.37 * (1200000 - 640601) = 399938.83
State: 0.01 * 11078 + 0.02 * (26264 - 11080) + 0.04 * (41452 - 26265) + 0.06 * (57542 - 41453) + 0.08 * (72724 - 57543) + 0.093 * (371479 - 72725) + 0.0103 * (445771 - 371480) + 0.0113 * (742953 - 445772) + 0.0123 * (1200000 - 742954)
SF property tax on a $4.5M property: 1.18268325% for a total of about $53,220.75
Total: about $493K for an effective tax rate of about 41%, assuming this hypothetical SF resident is single and just purchased their $4.5M property this year.
* Self-employment taxes: Lower-income people are usually 1099, and are typically subject to additional 7.5% tax
* Sales taxes: Lower income people typically spend most of their dollars on sales-taxable items, so an additional 10%+ on post-tax amounts, which figures out to additional 15%-ish on pre-tax income
* Health insurance: Lower income people typically have to buy their own health insurance, something that should have been provided by the country but isn't, and is effectively a systematic tax on everyone
* Health deductibles: Insurance sold to lower income people doesn't even cover the first few thousand dollars a year, while higher income brackets pay close to zero deductibles. In many other countries "deductibles" isn't even a thing; they too are an effective systematic tax on lower income brackets fueled by the oligarchy of government and financial powers
* Car registration fees: Registration really only requires paperwork done once; recurring annual "registration" is a tax rebranded as a registration
* Property taxes: Even if you don't own, you pay them -- your landlord passes them through to you
The list goes on and on. Taxes are split up like this only because there would be an uprising if they lumped it all together, so they split it up and tax you in pieces and chunks (April 15 is only one chunk) so that you think you're paying less, psychologically.
But yeah, 50% is about the right number for that income.
A mortgage is NOT owning! So many people are poisoned by this propaganda promoted by American society and banks. They prey on the masses by infiltrating the public with this live-on-borrowed-money ideology.
Your 60K/month may end NEXT month and become 0/month if you are subject to the next round of Zuck's layoffs, or you end up stack ranked and PIPed at Amazon due to internal politics. One of these things happen and poof you're in the 0th percentile of income.
In the bay area, if you want a $4.5M home, you need to have $4.5M in cash or liquid assets. Period. Otherwise you're risking a foreclosure disaster if you accidentally say something wrong in a leadership update meeting, or if this AI heyday comes crashing down.
Borrowing money does not mean you own something, and is a very American way of doing things.
It’s only fair I throw a creative wrench in your idea of ownership then: eminent domain. You can never own something if it can just be taken away even if you are compensated.
Only because the people in power have successfully brainwashed everyone into thinking so. I don't care what brainwashed people consider it to be. I only consider it what it actually is.
From first principles, it is objectively not ownership, if the bank has rights on it.
Then don’t worry your pretty little fingers informing us of your uninformed opinion. You get what you give.
You also cowardly avoided my last remark, or just have no idea what that is. Eminent domain says that your government can decide to take something you think you own, thus proving you don’t own it no matter where you put your name on it or how you paid for it.
it's not like a car where you have the option to do without, you can't do without a place to live. i am pro renting, but unlike a car loan i don't see a mortgage less financially responsible because you can almost always just repay the mortgage by selling the house, in other words unlike any other loan mortgage is unlikely to put you into a debt that you can't repay because the house is your collateral. (unless the housing market crashes maybe)