Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Michael Winslow Czeiszperger <michael AT czeiszperger.org>]

On Monday, November 4, 2002, at 12:24 PM, Anthony J Bull wrote:

> Yeah, yeah, I know, living in SF is expensive.  To figure out whether 
> I'll
> be able to afford it, I'm trying to answer the following questions:

In addition to those web sites, I recommend the book the Places Rated 
Almanac as a good source of hard information in which to compare areas. 
The last edition was published in 1999, so its a little out of date, 
but the comparative values like cost of living should still be fairly 
accurate, and it takes into account a lot more than just the cost of 
living.

>I've already looked on Salary.com, SalaryExpert.com, and Monster.com.

If you plug in a typical right-out-of-school starting salary of 
$45K/year in Raleigh, you'd have to make $142K/year in San Francisco to 
make up for the cost of living. (Note: the $45K figure was just pulled 
out of the air for comparison.)

Its been a while (~12 years) since I lived in that area, so I don't 
know if this has changed, but when I was there the salaries weren't 
near being high enough to offsite the cost of living. For example, I 
actually got a pay raise when moving from SF to Raleigh, which amounted 
to more than doubling my salary when taking into account the cost of 
living.

I admit SF has some advantages, but is it worth taking a huge pay cut 
to live there?

------------------------------
michael at czeiszperger dot org
Chapel Hill, NC