It's interesting that the majority of these answers are professions that pay nowhere near what a software developer's salary would be.
If the question were, "What other job would you like to do, if it paid at least as much as software development?" I could probably come up with some creative answers.
But even though I'm not particularly driven by money, given that I have a family to support, mortgage to pay, etc., I probably could not take a job right now that would significantly reduce my income.
With that constraint in mind, I suppose I would say I would return to my first career (journalism) and become an editor again. This would involve a significant drop in salary. So I would have to ramp up the time I devote to my second job. I'm an author of nonfiction books, which has been mostly a side project, but a relatively lucrative one. If I could bang out a book a year, on top of working full time as an editor, I could probably keep our household finances afloat.
Unless moving out of SF/NY is a deal breaker, it's not necessary to make $100k+ a year to have a solid middle class life. You won't be driving a BMW making $55k a year but you won't need to eat Ramen to make the mortgage payment either.
Obviously kids make this harder and my perspective is certainly biased as my wife and I don't plan on children so our nut is much lower every month than our friends with kids in HS or college.
I'm in a similar situation to you, (similar salary, 2 kids instead of 3), and think you are being hyperbolic claiming "100k is nothing honestly". I think maybe it comes down to the definition of "basic life".
Sure, 100k can go very fast with kids, and it won't make you independently wealthy, but many people manage a "basic life" and even saving some money living on far less.
The added expenses of 3 kids and a stay at home spouse completely changes the financial situation you're describing as opposed to the other poster. 100k+ not split among 4 nonworking people goes way further!
I find the change from having a family not very large, say 2x food and perhaps to be very generous +1k clothing. The chief difference is the desire to live in a own space instead of having roommates, which are hard to find with a family.
Suppose you live in Cambridge, MA and eat all organic food; rent with roommates and utilities costs perhaps 800/mo, subway costs perhaps 100/mo, food costs 300/mo, clothing is perhaps 100/mo, health insurance perhaps 1k/mo. This adds up to 1300/mo, 28k/year. Throw in a very luxurious 5k/year in travel, 4k/year in restaurants and hobbies, and your 100k salary / 67k takehome pay supports you saving 30k/year (more if you use tax advantaged accounts).
Consider a family of four in such a case. Taxes run about 21k/year instead of 33k/year, so takehome is 79k. A 1br in Cambridge runs about 2k/mo, maybe 2.5k/mo for luxury. Subway is 150/mo, food costs 700/mo, clothing of say 200/mo, healthcare is perhaps 1.5k/mo; these run 5k/mo in total, 60k/year. Throw in 5k for travel, rental cars, and hobbies, and you're still saving 15k/year for emergencies.
This seems like a very luxurious life, as someone who's lived it; expensive, and I found it slightly more luxurious than makes me happy. So yes, families affect saving rate, but also provide perpetual free entertainment.
Childcare makes a huge difference. Most people with kids either have to sacrifice a huge chunk of their income or a huge chunk of their income-earning potential.
I live paycheck to paycheck on six figures in the midwest. I'm not broke but I'm certainly not living it up. People act like 100k is life changing money.
I think it depends more on circumstances before you get to $100k. If I had parents who paid for school I'd probably be living it up too.
Different experiences. I put myself through school, have $50k in student loan debt, and I'm living comfortably on $54k/yr in New Jersey. Renting a small house, and sending around 15-20% of my income to help support my mother and 5 young siblings. I eat out a few times a month, and otherwise have a modest entertainment budget. I'm only able to set aside a very small amount, if anything, right now, but overall, I'm fairly secure. Without a requirement to live in an expensive area, I don't see why anyone would have trouble living on $100k/yr even with a couple kids and a non-working spouse. May not be luxurious, but should at least be comfortable.
I often wonder if it's just people who have a different concept of what is a necessity vs a luxury due to never having to go without for a significant part of their lives, or people who have just never lived outside of the cities or other expensive areas.
> I often wonder if it's just people who have a different concept of what is a necessity vs a luxury due to never having to go without for a significant part of their lives, or people who have just never lived outside of the cities or other expensive areas.
In my case, I lived on the lower end of the income spectrum for much of my childhood, and lived even poorer while building my startup in a low-cost area. So it is with deep experience and sincerity that I say I have no desire ever to repeat those years, nor to inflict such a life on any future young humans.
Exactly. The GP of my comment talks about 100k not being lifechanging money. I know for a fact that it would have been dramatically lifechanging if my mother or stepfather had been making anywhere near 100k during my childhood, even adjusted for inflation.
I can really see both sides of the argument here. 100k is not permanently life changing for the recipient. But if it can be earned sustainably, it is a pretty big difference for the recipient's children, if any.
Ways in which it's not life changing: probably have to live in a more expensive area, which eats into the benefit. Still have to play the office game with people you may or may not like. Still have to save up and budget if you want to travel. You won't live in a mansion with a full-time staff. You still won't have enough money to trade money for popularity if popularity is something you lack and want.
Ways it is life changing: can afford more nutritious and more enjoyable food, which helps make life more sustainable. Can provide better food/clothes/schooling for any children (I have none of my own), which gives them an advantage when they reach adulthood. Can live two or three emergencies away from devastation instead of just one.
I certainly meet necessities and a few luxury items but people think 100k is like rap star money or something. We don't make enough to buy some frivolous luxury items like a designer bag or an actual new car. We make enough to spend more than normal on groceries, go out to eat a few times a month, and pay the rest of our debt. Not enough to have a decent liquid savings account. Every time I get $500 saved up I end up with some new medical bill that I forgot about.
Seeing stuff like this makes me wanna jump in the water and swim across the ocean. On my current salary, I'd have to work nearly 7 years to get 100k. You're living it up.
Averages alone don't give you the full picture; surgeons can rack up >$250K of debt which is probably about as high as it goes (the average medical school debt for 2015 grads was $183K, mind you). On the other end, plenty of young adults don't have any debt coming out of college (worked numerous jobs, parents paid, scholarships paid, some schools don't charge for people under certain circumstances, etc.) It just turns out that once you take the one-and-a-quarter trillion dollar student loan debt, add the 44 million-ish college grads up and do the division, the average lands you around your number (albeit I'm seeing $28K with newer data: https://www.newyorkfed.org/microeconomics/hhdc.html).
You'd need a lot more data than I have on-hand or care to track down bit-by-bit, but from the number of doctors and lawyers we mint yearly I wouldn't be surprised if 1/10 college grads were well over $50K in debt; MBAs make up something like 10% of graduate degrees and cost around $40K on average by themselves. To me, one in ten is not all that uncommon - student loan delinquency rate more than that ;).
On top of that, it's not "uncommon" for two people who are both surgeons or doctors or lawyers or MBAs to find each other and get married; these people, very much like most of the software engineers I've met, live around their jobs. The people they meet are quite often in their same fields, and have similar financial backgrounds as a result. Two young MBAs? Easily $80K in the hole together.
We in the Bay Area just get this warped sense of perspective because everyone here has to make absurd gobs of money just to make rent, reenforced by the demand for good software engineers being so high. Most of the other people we deal with or interact with are either software engineers themselves or are directly in support of software. We get insulated and siloed from differing perspectives by our monocultured Silicon Valley society.
(And yeah, doctors and lawyers don't usually become doctors and lawyers from the goodness of their hearts alone; they understand that eventually they will come back and get way ahead of their massive debts, especially as the government keeps piling on incentives like debt forgiveness and restructured repayment plans to keep people choosing these avenues of work.)
If you interpret that as $100k total rather than each, it's probably not terribly uncommon. I've got over $50k myself, so if I had a partner with similar, that's where we'd be. Median debt would be also be more useful than average, I think, or even just the top 25 percentile. Basically, anyone who paid for their education entirely with loans (say, while barely supporting themselves or even using excess loan dollars for food/rent) would be in this position.
As a former journalist myself (and someone who longs to write books), I'd be very interested in your thoughts on someone doing this career swap away from tech into writing nonfiction.
I realize this isn't particularly related to the thread at hand, but do you have any advice for "breaking into the biz"? It looks like the baby experiments book was published by a "conventional" publisher, too, which seems increasingly rare these days. I'm fascinated by people who can make money writing nonfiction without having an academic pedigree or something similar.
1) I found an agent by searching on aaronline.org and sending book-proposal queries to agents who seemed like they were a good fit.
2) Although the costs of self-publishing have gone down, the problem with self publishing, for my type of nonfiction anyway, is when it comes to distribution. Getting the book into brick-and-mortar stores, getting the book reviewed by reputable outlets, securing foreign rights deals ... that all becomes much easier if you have a book deal with a traditional publisher. Not to mention the advance.
3) Because I don't have an academic pedigree, I'm limited in terms of the type of material I can write. But my experience as a journalist helps, because although I'm not an authority myself, I'm able to take authoritative material and boil it down for a broader audience. That said, having a background as a journalist might help you get a book deal, but it's insufficient if you don't have enough of a platform: https://janefriedman.com/author-platform-definition/
Thanks for the response, this is really helpful. I'm unfortunately pretty well-acquainted with the marketing shortcomings of the self-publishing arena, but it's good to know it's not impossible to just start sending agents old-school query letters.
I'm an artist and a musician, and if I could do anything as a career, It would be in the arts. Unfortunately, it's difficult to put food on the table as an artist or a musician. As a musician, there's gigs and tours all the time, and probably a move to LA or Austin - not a very family friendly lifestyle, assuming I'm even good enough to find some success.
If the question were, "What other job would you like to do, if it paid at least as much as software development?" I could probably come up with some creative answers.
But even though I'm not particularly driven by money, given that I have a family to support, mortgage to pay, etc., I probably could not take a job right now that would significantly reduce my income.
With that constraint in mind, I suppose I would say I would return to my first career (journalism) and become an editor again. This would involve a significant drop in salary. So I would have to ramp up the time I devote to my second job. I'm an author of nonfiction books, which has been mostly a side project, but a relatively lucrative one. If I could bang out a book a year, on top of working full time as an editor, I could probably keep our household finances afloat.