Why are DCUM salaries so much higher than in "real life"?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ok this is just bullshit. Plenty of financial advisors recommend the 30 over the 15. paying 0.5-1% more to retain financial flexibility (even if you could pay) seems like a fair tradeoff. Plus if you believe in any decent expected returns, you want to minimize home payments. We take our savings from our 2.5% 30-year re-fi and buy I-bonds and equities. We could've done a 15 year at 2%, but that would have be a silly move.

No doubt it would have been a silly move. You would have been struggling every month to make ends meet with a 15 year mortgage.

Your argument is just the proving that 15 year mortgages are the way to go for the financially responsible. The only financial advisors that recommend 30 over 15 are dealing with exceptionally immature and greedy customers that insist on buying a home outside their price range with a 15. The financial flexibility you reference is just as possible with a 15 year mortgage, no? With a 15 year I can easily make extra principal payments whenever I choose. Moreover, if you find it necessary to stretch to a 30 year so you can afford to invest more into the stock market, then you can’t possibly be appropriately diversified.

I have a 15 year mortgage and it constitutes 20% of my take home pay. This leaves 80% for all other expenses, with tons of financial flexibility. And, considering that I’m already putting 20% of my gross pay into the stock market, I can easily throw another 20% into 529 and taxable brokerage accounts to bring it up significantly more. For every dollar I invest in my home, I am still investing almost 5 in the stock market. Why would I feel it necessary to push even more into stocks?

Clearly, the only way you can afford to invest in stocks is by leveraging your so-called financial flexibility from a 30 year mortgage. Pathetic.

Yeah but you live in a shithole to afford those mortgage payments on a 15yr don’t you? You think your plan is so great but 20-30 years later, you and the people who got a nicer house with a 30 yr mortgage are going to have the house paid off and around the same net worth. And they would have lived much better than you, so no need to be smug.

There is some truth to this, I suppose. Because we went with a 15 year mortgage, we could only afford a $7.6M home in Wesley Heights. As you point out, we could have gotten more if we went with a 30 year. Not too many $12M+ properties were available, though. Instead, we’re building equity on our dump of a home and only have $25M invested in the stock market. Wonder what we’re missing out on?

Bragging about your stock account and your home’s value on the internet is about as sad as it gets. I’m sure your house is nice though, so that’s one good thing one could say about you.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ok this is just bullshit. Plenty of financial advisors recommend the 30 over the 15. paying 0.5-1% more to retain financial flexibility (even if you could pay) seems like a fair tradeoff. Plus if you believe in any decent expected returns, you want to minimize home payments. We take our savings from our 2.5% 30-year re-fi and buy I-bonds and equities. We could've done a 15 year at 2%, but that would have be a silly move.

No doubt it would have been a silly move. You would have been struggling every month to make ends meet with a 15 year mortgage.

Your argument is just the proving that 15 year mortgages are the way to go for the financially responsible. The only financial advisors that recommend 30 over 15 are dealing with exceptionally immature and greedy customers that insist on buying a home outside their price range with a 15. The financial flexibility you reference is just as possible with a 15 year mortgage, no? With a 15 year I can easily make extra principal payments whenever I choose. Moreover, if you find it necessary to stretch to a 30 year so you can afford to invest more into the stock market, then you can’t possibly be appropriately diversified.

I have a 15 year mortgage and it constitutes 20% of my take home pay. This leaves 80% for all other expenses, with tons of financial flexibility. And, considering that I’m already putting 20% of my gross pay into the stock market, I can easily throw another 20% into 529 and taxable brokerage accounts to bring it up significantly more. For every dollar I invest in my home, I am still investing almost 5 in the stock market. Why would I feel it necessary to push even more into stocks?

Clearly, the only way you can afford to invest in stocks is by leveraging your so-called financial flexibility from a 30 year mortgage. Pathetic.

Yeah but you live in a shithole to afford those mortgage payments on a 15yr don’t you? You think your plan is so great but 20-30 years later, you and the people who got a nicer house with a 30 yr mortgage are going to have the house paid off and around the same net worth. And they would have lived much better than you, so no need to be smug.

There is some truth to this, I suppose. Because we went with a 15 year mortgage, we could only afford a $7.6M home in Wesley Heights. As you point out, we could have gotten more if we went with a 30 year. Not too many $12M+ properties were available, though. Instead, we’re building equity on our dump of a home and only have $25M invested in the stock market. Wonder what we’re missing out on?

It’s weird that you are so invested in trying to prove you know the best way to maximize wealth. I don’t know if you are generally this insecure about your life choices or if you are trying to prove to yourself that having less money to invest in the bull market was a good thing or what but it’s not our job to make you feel good about your choices.

[Anonymous]

Because this site is about keeping up with the Joneses, so it attracts super competitive strivers.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I know DC is a HCOL area so salaries are higher than normal, but the $400K-$2M salaries that are often bandied about here are so unreal to me. I can only think of three possibilities to explain this:

1) DCUM is a congregation that specifically attracts this small subset of high earners

2) These salaries are more common than I think, and they simply go unnoticed because people generally don't talk about money openly

3) People are lying liars who lie about their income.

Which is it?

Almost every person who posts on this site is lying and exaggerating. There is another current post in Money and Finance on having a 15 year vs. 30 year mortgage. What’s interesting there, is that every sound and conservative advisor knows that a 15 year mortgage is the way to go. Yet on DCUM, there is a high concentration of vehement opposition to a 15 year and support for a 30 year. This makes no sense for a group that is allegedly pulling in $500K+ in HHI. People on here know enough to lie about HHI, net worth, and home values. But, they’re not smart enough to know about the less obvious wealth revealing indicators. I especially like the ones in their mid-30s they already have 1M+ in their 401k and retirement plans. A near impossibility given federal limits on annual contributions. They’re just to dumb to know this isn’t possible.

15 year mortgages are not necessarily the way to go when interest rates are so low, as they were for almost ten years until recently. Furthermore no one I know earning under a million has taken out a shorter term mortgage and even those ppl are quite nervous about it and where mortgage rates will be when it’s up if they can’t or don’t want to pay off the homes. You sound quite defensive.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I know DC is a HCOL area so salaries are higher than normal, but the $400K-$2M salaries that are often bandied about here are so unreal to me. I can only think of three possibilities to explain this:

1) DCUM is a congregation that specifically attracts this small subset of high earners

2) These salaries are more common than I think, and they simply go unnoticed because people generally don't talk about money openly

3) People are lying liars who lie about their income.

Which is it?

Almost every person who posts on this site is lying and exaggerating. There is another current post in Money and Finance on having a 15 year vs. 30 year mortgage. What’s interesting there, is that every sound and conservative advisor knows that a 15 year mortgage is the way to go. Yet on DCUM, there is a high concentration of vehement opposition to a 15 year and support for a 30 year. This makes no sense for a group that is allegedly pulling in $500K+ in HHI. People on here know enough to lie about HHI, net worth, and home values. But, they’re not smart enough to know about the less obvious wealth revealing indicators. I especially like the ones in their mid-30s they already have 1M+ in their 401k and retirement plans. A near impossibility given federal limits on annual contributions. They’re just to dumb to know this isn’t possible.

100% wrong. It's a math equation.

If a 30yr saves me 2K a month and I invest that over 30 years at average historical rates, I will be way wealthier than saving some interest on a 15yr note. It's not rocket scientist. I made 1.2M last year and would never do a 15yr. Use good debt as a tool..

[Anonymous]

I was interested to see the “SalaryTransparentStreet” YouTube channel doing a lot of content in and around the dc metro and salaries were a lot more on “average” and I think this is a much better representation of the folks in the DMV (go check out those videos on YouTube if you want a sense of what normal people are doing in the dmv).

It’s easy to troll on an anonymous forum. Most of these people are probably spending 20+hrs in bed a day on DCUM claiming how they are “rich”. If the cameras came on these trolls, they would waddle back to their hovels like cockroaches.

[Anonymous]

You should check out the SAT/ACT scores on the college forum. I’m pretty sure there are trolls over there constantly posting about their kids’ near perfect scores. Everyone is 99th percentile. I’m guessing there’s some overlap with this board.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This board is dominated by in DC, close-in suburbs, and relatively close-in ‘burbs. So mostly Mclean, Arlington, Bethesda, Chevy Chase, NW and NE and Capitol Hill dc. That means you are commuting to somewhere within the downtown DC sphere- or the DOD or NIH- and that’s a very specific type of person with dual college education and likely advanced degrees double income couples. That is not normal to the rest of the country. Add in the inherited UMC and UC money and you get a fairly high net worth set of individuals.

I didn’t grow up with money as my family had financial difficulties, but I went to private school and university with these people. When I started posting on DCUM for help with my budget after my first child 8 years ago our household income was $250 dual. It is now $450 hhi. This was from both myself and my partner working our tails off. We also received a $200k gift and borrowed to it a down payment on a house. Between all the savings and the gift, we are now at ~$1.9-2 net worth, with about $700k in retirement, and paid off $100k of student loans via cash flow, and childcare . I think many couples in my neighborhood have their parents do things like sell thier family home to them, or free childcare, etc. etc. If one or both income earners get into high paying jobs, then you continue the process for the next generation etc.

What I’m worried about though is that the democracy that has resulted in the world biggest wealth production is straining. So I’m not feeling comfortable even with this level of income security. It hurts to see how bad gas prices are for service workers, and someday that could be me. Life is not predictable.

It all is so nuts. I was so lucky to have been born with the privileges that got me where I am today. I just as easily could have been born into a family who is struggling. Or things might change and our luck runs out in the future.

But some people do not acknowledge this at all, they really think they are making millions only because they are hard workers.

Or that nothing bad will ever happen to them to keep them and their spouse from working. Life happens and it happens very quickly. To depend on two incomes is asinine.

[Anonymous]

I disagree. Some of the posts are obviously trolls, like the initial post about the 15-year mortgage upthread. But a lot of households do make $500K. It’s not that hard to imagine with 2 $200K jobs and some type of passive investment stream. And think of how many attorneys and lobbyists live around here. There’s a lot of wealth around here, and DCUM tends to attract that crowd.

[Anonymous]

Income stream, not investment stream…

[Anonymous]

Because it’s a self selecting group of contributors in a HCOL highly educated area. It’s like going skiing in Colorado and asking why HHI there seems so much higher than at the Minnesota state fair.

For another example, if you went to a trump rally in Michigan, you would get a lot of salaries that are much lower than the DCUM reality.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I know DC is a HCOL area so salaries are higher than normal, but the $400K-$2M salaries that are often bandied about here are so unreal to me. I can only think of three possibilities to explain this:

1) DCUM is a congregation that specifically attracts this small subset of high earners

2) These salaries are more common than I think, and they simply go unnoticed because people generally don't talk about money openly

3) People are lying liars who lie about their income.

Which is it?

it's your 3 and the fact that SAH spouses of a few high earners keep posting the same.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I know DC is a HCOL area so salaries are higher than normal, but the $400K-$2M salaries that are often bandied about here are so unreal to me. I can only think of three possibilities to explain this:

1) DCUM is a congregation that specifically attracts this small subset of high earners

2) These salaries are more common than I think, and they simply go unnoticed because people generally don't talk about money openly

3) People are lying liars who lie about their income.

Which is it?

Almost every person who posts on this site is lying and exaggerating. There is another current post in Money and Finance on having a 15 year vs. 30 year mortgage. What’s interesting there, is that every sound and conservative advisor knows that a 15 year mortgage is the way to go. Yet on DCUM, there is a high concentration of vehement opposition to a 15 year and support for a 30 year. This makes no sense for a group that is allegedly pulling in $500K+ in HHI. People on here know enough to lie about HHI, net worth, and home values. But, they’re not smart enough to know about the less obvious wealth revealing indicators. I especially like the ones in their mid-30s they already have 1M+ in their 401k and retirement plans. A near impossibility given federal limits on annual contributions. They’re just to dumb to know this isn’t possible.

NP here. I haven't read the "15 year mortgage" thread but I can tell you this: while it may be true that every "conservative" advisor knows that a 15 year mortgage is the "way to go," not every "sound" financial advisor thinks that way. There are many "sound" ways to use mortgage financing and for many wealthy people a 30 year mortgage makes sense.

I've lied and exaggerated about things on DCUM but have been very accurate and precise about my income. I retired early, but when I was working I made very good money -- I averaged over $700k my last ten years on the job -- and I never even considered a 15 year mortgage. I will agree, though, they many posters likely lie about the size of their retirement portfolios and net worth. It's very hard for folks in their 30s and even 40s to accumulate assets along the lines being described here.

Yeah. That 15 year mortgage advice is not always right for high earners. I was over 400k starting in 2005 same year as I bought 2.3 million house. Was a new big law partner We had 30 year and used money to jump start college funds/beach home account/extra retirement. Could not do that with 15 year payments Paid off mortgage completely by year 10.

Maybe some extra money added in by some posters. But in Biglaw alone, there are probably a few thousand in DC over 400k as that is mid/senior level associate money.

[Anonymous]

Are Biglaw high earners billing the hours they spend on DCUM bragging about their incomes?

[Anonymous]

I work on K Street and I assure you some of the high salaries are real. However, many DCUM-ers are probably house-poor or otherwise cash-strapped.