Salary question for those of you pulling in the big bucks.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'll give this a stab. We net somewhere between $800K-$1M and that is likely to increase rapidly as I know have several million invested (and not in stocks). I also think that my answer is going to be different than those with incomes in the $500K range.

High income is a mindset, not a salary. Once you reach a certain point with money, you realize there are infinite opportunities around you to make more money. That in and of itself provides me a certain level of freedom that someone with a salary can never have.

It also produces odd juxtapositions. Our last house was a multi unit in a great part of town. Rental income from that house nearly exceeded our mortgage and it would have only gone up. There is no way to compare that to your $1500 mortgage. My payment (net of rental income) was going to forever go down. Yours (even if the mortgage is paid in full) would only go up.

You may consider a beach vacation and pay $2000 for the week. Someone in the $500K range may buy a beach condo. I am looking a commercial building with 2 apartments on top.

If you want an inexpensive dinner out, you might get pizza. Someone in the $500K range might do sit down at a chain restaurant. I would go to a nicer restaurant that I own a minority share of.

I also earn more interest on my bank accounts, pay a lower mortgage rate, pay less for insurance coverage, etc.

OMG. We net the same amount but I am thankful that I am not a pretentious twit. Although the vacations in an apartment above a commercial building is indeed an "odd juxtaposition".

[Anonymous]

18:14 - don't talk to me about immigration. I know ALL about immigration. You clearly have no idea who you are talking to. Yes, it is possible to actually do things legally and still succeed. What a concept.

No wonder you people are so miserable. Keep judging. You are so very far off.

[Anonymous]

Funny how many resort to name calling when they at the same time wonder why they will never be.......well, anything.....

[Anonymous]

PP Wow, good one! You are definitely the coolest girl in the 6th grade!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:18:14 - don't talk to me about immigration. I know ALL about immigration. You clearly have no idea who you are talking to. Yes, it is possible to actually do things legally and still succeed. What a concept.

No wonder you people are so miserable. Keep judging. You are so very far off.

whoah! no one was talking about legal vs illegal immigrants. the fact that you assumed immigrant = illegal pretty much proves my point and suspicions. you are living in an unrealistic world where you think concepts like "old money" mean anything to the general population.

[Anonymous]

Let's see:

We take in $17K per month net; gross is $375K/year, so about 4.5% of our yearly income.

We pay $3600/mo on mortgage and pay $200/week to our au pair, as compared to your $1500 mortgage & no daycare, so about $1900 more.

So call it $2k/month. If we brought in only $15K per month, and that was the same ratio to our gross, our gross would be $330K and we'd be equally comfortable.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Let's see:

We take in $17K per month net; gross is $375K/year, so about 4.5% of our yearly income.

We pay $3600/mo on mortgage and pay $200/week to our au pair, as compared to your $1500 mortgage & no daycare, so about $1900 more.

So call it $2k/month. If we brought in only $15K per month, and that was the same ratio to our gross, our gross would be $330K and we'd be equally comfortable.

Whoops, just realized that student loans were also part of the mix. We pay $350 or so per month for student loans, so call it $500. If we brought home $14,500 per month, and that was the same ratio to our gross, the gross would be $319K.

[Anonymous]

I have no student loans AND no mortgage and make $200K a year. We bank all of my net salary.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
Whoa! This has really gone off in an unanticipated direction.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is not a striving post. I'm not talking vacation homes and where you eat out on a regular basis.

Comfortable. It means not crying with each in-coming bill. It means being able to get groceries every two weeks, not calculating how many nights in a month you can make use of the 10 for $10 pasta you bought on sale.

Today, I had to choose between buying grapes or strawberries. I'm REALLY looking forward to leaving this bullshit behind.

Since most posters tend to whinge on about scraping by with salaries much higher than I'll ever earn, I was interested to know what burden even high earners were struggling to meet (like the oft cited enormous law school debt of 400K or mortgage payments more than double my own).

In my own way, I'm trying to comfort myself that things won't continue to be such a struggle once I'm making 80-90K. Most DCUMers would shoot themselves or go flying out of windows at the prospect of such a low salary. BUT, absent the big monthly obligations noted above, I wonder how much it would matter?

Stop projecting materialistic aspirations. And lay off the lectures. They are really off the mark.

07:55 and 13:45 were very helpful and straight forward. Thanks.

(7:55 here). I totally understood where you were coming from and didn't find your question weird at all! I was totally baffled by some of the other responses. Maybe because I'm not living in the $500k la la land some of the posters seem to be posting from.

OP--fwiw, our salary only recently hit $240k. 3 years ago we were making more like $150k, but with no daycare (pre-kid) and our mortgage was $3000 not $3500. (we refinanced down to a 15 year mortgage, we did not trade up our house.) We still felt like we lived very comfortably at that point, not extravagantly, but still able to afford vacations, fancy grocery splurges, had a fully funded emergency fund, and put money into savings every month. Taking into account the mortgage difference, that's $18000 a year, with taxes etc call it $25k difference. So, at effectively $125k, I felt like we had a very comfortable lifestyle. We never stressed about money or worried about covering a car repair or other unexpected expense.

It sounds like you're doing a good job of being fiscally responsible, and as long as you keep doing that, it's likely to continue to get better assuming you have the kind of career where you can reasonably expect to advance. Good luck!