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Comment by TwiztidK | Hacker News Reader

I just visited some friends in southern California and the possibility of me moving out there came up in conversation. So, I used a cost of living calculator to figure how much more I would need to make to be at the same level... 60% more. Definitely not going to happen.

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I visited a few times in the past. Spent a large part of the day stuck in LA traffic. It wasn't even morning or evening community, it seems it is an all day kinda thing.

There was a metro / subway there but it never seemed to go where we wanted to go.

Traffic in LA is an all day (and all night) thing. But, like anywhere else, you can choose to live close to work -- or not.

The light rail is actually a huge success story in LA right now.

I only took Uber mostly but would also commute from downtown to Beverly Hills. I never once got stuck in traffic but we always left after 10am.

Also it depends on which way you are going. The 405 north of Sunset is a disaster if you (in general) are going from West LA to the Valley after work but if you travel the opposite ways, traffic is generally fine...

Not to worry. In just 25 more years, the metro system will go almost all the way to the airport.

Something that most people fail to calculate as well is the difference in hours spent for work. If you have to add 2 extra hours of daily commute to your schedule you suddenly decrease your hourly wage by ~18% (estimating original commute of 1 hour daily). Not to mention all the other costs associated with that extra driving.

Meh, it's not impossible. My salary went up 50% when I moved here.

Ok, but a 50% salary bump doesn't help as much if you also get a 4x (or more) house cost bump.

Before: 100k / 12k ($1k/month) = 88k After: 150k / 48k ($4k/month) = 102k

Sure, you say to yourself that you ended up with an extra 14k, but then you need to still factor in the rest of your increased costs. And you should probably recalculate everything as an hourly equivalent since you'll likely add 2 or more hours to your daily commute in exchange for keeping that house cost bump at a mere 4x.

The numbers shift based on where you are and how much you make. The point is that a large number of people don't properly factor in all the actual and implicit cost and quality of life changes.

When Yahoo bought Interclick, and then subsequently brought us out, they gave my team CoL bumps that had us at roughly the same level in the Bay Area as we were in South Florida. But we were away from the heat/humidity, lack of undulation, and bugs (flying cockroaches; ugh).

And the bullets.

I looked at some pay ranges on Payscale and a few other sites and I really do not see that happening. Perhaps I could swing a 30% increase, but (after taxes) the difference in rent alone would consume most of that.

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