Cavemen had "the essentials of life." That's not what I'm going for, and not what most people are going for. Every little bit extra helps.
Go take the absolute highest paying offer the next time you interview for jobs, and if you do that a series of times, I think you'll find you won't be as happy as taking the best overall offer that takes into account things like:
- Role/responsibility
- How interesting the work is
- Whether you're excited to work with your future peers
There's a reason people leave finance despite the high pay. There's more to life than money.
This leaves me with three options. Rent forever, at increasing rates. (not a feasible option). Buy a house now, ride the constant increasing prices like everyone already in the market, be glad I'm not a buyer any more. (trying, but very hard to compete when 10% above listing is common.) Save up and move the hell out.
In any of these situations, a 5%, hell, a 1% raise compounded over a decade, makes a _meaningful_ difference in how long you'd be able to sustain living in a better cost of living area (e.g. if I moved out into the country somewhere), if not also on how much I can put out as a down-payment or as a lifeline to keeping up with increasing rent.
Perhaps it's a sign of what would have in the past been comfortably middle class being more and more stretched, but every little bit counts; it's an oddly similar feeling to when I used to be far less well off a few decades back.