- Joined
- Apr 25, 2014
- Messages
- 8,225
That is a fair point - it's all well and good earning high sums of money, but if you have to spend it to live where you are working (or near to it) then you are ultimately no better off than someone earning half what you do but with half the size of living bills!Ooohshiny, I believe you are missing the point. Housing in New York and San Francisco, many parts of California, Chicago are extremely high, Making $200,000 is not going to get you very far in these areas of the US? My husband works for a British company and his peers located there are making over £100k a year.
House prices in the UK are also a bit crazy in many places, especially in the cities and the south/south-east. London is a whole different ballgame (300 square feet studio apartment for £400k+, anyone? ) but even moving to a commuter town on a main railway line will see most struggle to buy a home. You are looking at around £200k for a new-build 300 square feet studio apartment with no parking and right in the middle of the town centre (so noisy and filled with rowdy drunk people during the evenings), and even a small two-bed terraced house would cost a quarter of a million or more.
On the average UK wage of £26500(ish) that would be almost 10x salary as a lone person, so if you haven't got a partner, you have virtually no hope of getting on the property ladder unless you have money in the family or have secured a high-paying job and stayed at the family home to save as much as you can. Meanwhile, it costs just as much, if not more, to rent a flat/apartment, or you can rent a double room in a shared house for perhaps £500/month, so it is incredibly difficult to save while also living independently.
As @nkarma notes, though, at least in the UK you have a healthcare system paid for by all that is free at the point of use. It's not working as well as it should, granted, and there is inevitably some waste in the system, but it means that one can go to Accident and Emergency with appendix pain, safe in the knowledge that you won't end up paying $50k+ for what is a routine operation. (That's a sweeping generalisation against the US healthcare system, which I freely admit I am not fully up-to-speed on, but hopefully you get my point! )