littlestar

for various reasons, the cost of living in the bay area has come up with three different friends in the past few months. this inspired me to actually estimate how much i spend.

parakkum and i have spent about $28K (conservatively, that is... rounding up) so far this year (0.5 years). that's including rent for two people with two rents (1.5 places, actually = one bedroom apt in san jose, half a two-bedroom townhouse in downtown mountain view), two separate health insurances, separate utilities (power, water, dsl, cell phones, cable tv, etc) and whatever miscellaneous stuff to go with that.

as much as i complain about san jose, it's still a nice place to be. it's not berkeley or sf, but most places aren't. :)

and downtown mountain view is certainly not a bad place to be (read: it's a good place to be).

so you have two people paying rents at non-boonyville areas in the bay area spending about 28K in the span of 6 months. take out an additional 3K if you're not an art student with 4 rabbits (tuition + supplies + books + rabbit feed, litter, etc).

that brings us to ~$25K for two people with two rents in the bay area, living comfortably for half a year. we eat out at nice places fairly frequently (and sushi is my favorite food, so you do that math). we travel. we go to conventions and spur of the moment road trips to reno. we watch the occasional movie, buy the occassional dvd. we're members at a zoo, aquarium and art museum. we read comics. he buys miniatures and i play video games. we read a lot of books.

we're not huge spenders, but we're not exactly frugal, either. it's certainly not like we're living on toast every day.

for a single person to live here for a year, spending ~$1100/mo on rent (average of parakkum's and my rent), living as comfortably as we do, you're looking at spending about $25K a year.

for a couple to share a place that is about ~$2200/mo on rent, living as comfortably as we do.... you're looking at about $50K a year.

mind you, we're not paying for cars. so if you're buying a new car, tack that on top of these estimates. but yeah... living here, not as expensive as most people tend to think. buying a home... that's a different issue, but if you spend like us and you earn more than we do (remember, i'm a student--means minus money) you're probably saving money.