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this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2024
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If the pay for engineers wasn't shit I'd genuinely consider it, but getting 1/3 of my current pay to leave San Francisco ain't worth it. Especially given all my friends are here and I don't need a car.
You're forgetting all the things you don't need to pay for in Germany. Healthcare, massive insurances and rent, could even forgo a car with the great public transport and work from home. Might even have more left over at the end of the day than if you were to live where you live now.
An engineer living in Germany really doesn't have it bad at all.
I'm not saying it's a bad life at all, but I do not have to think about money at all in my day to day life because I make so much in the US. I'm really not trying to flex and genuinely live my life pretty frugally, but to drive the point I'm trying to make I bought $2500 worth of snowboarding shit and didn't even have to think about it. This was after donating $5k to my childhood elementary school for a yearly scholarship I started, maxing out a traditional IRA ($6.5k) and nearly maxing out my 401k ($18k). There's absolutely no way I'd break even in Germany given I'd have an after tax income of ~50k euros of which the above is over half and it's only April.
To go a bit deeper, I work for a healthcare data company so my healthcare is some of the best in the country with premiums 100% covered by my employer. My yearly out of pocket for deductibles is under $200 and my max out of pocket is $2500 in the absolute worst case scenario. I spend $40/month between life, dental, and renter's insurance.
Rent seems to be equivalent, maybe slightly cheaper, as I'd want to live in a big city and my current share of rent is $2000/month for a 148 sq meter apartment I share with my partner.
Then there's the much higher tax burden through things like VAT and extremely high income taxes in Germany.
The unfortunate part about the US is it is an amazing place to have a lot of money, and an awful place to be if you're poor. It would definitely make sense for someone in a lower income bracket, but once you clear $150k/year here most of the problems of the country no longer apply to you. I still very much want things to get better for the less fortunate, but I have no incentive or desire to leave given my current situation.
Edit: Someone mentioned kids. We don't plan on ever having any, but my partner and I have a combined income of over $400k per year so kids are more than feasible. Even just on one of our incomes it would be a comfortable life.
You should compare by salary minus cost of living instead of just by salary alone, almost most places will be way lower than SF in terms of salary.
Another thing to consider is work policies and overall lifestyle of the people there and see if you are compatible. For instance it's generally not ok to talk about work outside of work in the Netherlands, so if you are a workaholic it would cause some issues.
I went into this deeper in another response and having triple the salary while having a much lower effective tax rate is almost impossible to make up for. Not to mention I'd want to live in a big city if I did move which would make the cost of living a lot closer.
A lot of places put SF at 40% higher cost of living than Berlin, but the prices they list for things here are way too high. Assuming the numbers are high for Berlin too triple the salary with lower taxes easily beats the measly 40% cost of living increase. I'm sure engineers in Germany have a comfortable life, but the math doesn't work out in my favor.
As for lifestyles my friends and I almost never talk about work either as we very much want to leave work at work. I probably average 30 hours as do many of my friends so it's not like we're grinding. Just trying to do our time and leave.