especially since moving for work usually means moving to somewhere more expensive. If I live in a lower COL city and get laid off, my savings would carry me a lot further. If I move to San Francisco or New York for a job and get laid off, I'd have to find a new one immediately
It’s not that simple, if I were young, single or even married with no kids, even if my expenses went up to double from living some place like Atlanta to San Francisco and your income went up $75K - $100K+, you should still be able to save a lot of money to increase your savings.
The average mid level to senior developer[1] in Atlanta and most other 2nd tier cities working in enterprise dev makes between $130K to $170K and that’s been surprisingly stagnant and hasn’t kept up with inflation since 2016. Compare that to a developer working in any of the major public tech companies or competitive private companies wheee you can make $250K+ easily.
I don’t live in Atlanta anymore and I’m no longer officially a developer. But most developer jobs that come to me are still from there and that’s where I know the most non BigTech developers from.
No you won’t be buying the big house in the burbs. But even if you rent a place twice as expensive, you’ll still come out ahead.
What if you have a house? If I were young today and no kids, I wouldn’t buy a house so I would have the mobility. I would live light so I could move easily.
[1] no matter what your title is, you will be leveled as a mid level developer in any nsjor tech company if all you do is pull well defined tasks off of the board
