Usually when someone mentions a salary figure it's pre-tax. $500k in NYC is ~285k post-tax.
If you have a family, a $1.5m house (which barely gets you a shabby 3-bedroom in a high cost city) will, assuming you put $300k down, be around $8-$10k/month in mortgage + property taxes + insurance + any hoa/maintenence, which is by itself 40% of your monthly take home.
> If you have a family, a $1.5m house (which barely gets you a shabby 3-bedroom in a high cost city)
Uh... median house price in Seattle is less than half that. $1.5 million for a house in Seattle will get you an extremely nice house. Extremely nice.
If you disagree, it's because you have incredibly high standards for what constitutes "nice". That's fine, but it makes it more than a bit silly to complain that you "can't afford" a different lifestyle.
So literally 2 cities. Wildly expensive cities like DC, Seattle, Boston are still highly livable on $1.5 million.
Honestly, if you're regretting your life choices so severely but you're unwilling to live anywhere but NYC/SF, you're either not really regretting your life choices that much, or you're just really bad at making good decisions with your life.
I'm making the assumption that there are more jobs that pay $500k+ in Silicon Valley and NYC. If you can get that salary in 2nd cities like SEA or BOS then of course you're doing better than someone making the same in higher CoL places.
If you have a family, a $1.5m house (which barely gets you a shabby 3-bedroom in a high cost city) will, assuming you put $300k down, be around $8-$10k/month in mortgage + property taxes + insurance + any hoa/maintenence, which is by itself 40% of your monthly take home.