It's not too common, but it's doable.
Most programers make between 120-160 as you said.
Honestly, it's a matter of diminishing returns. Your lifestyle is probably not going to change between making 150, and making 200.
The tax rates are so absurdly high at that level, you might keep about half of that additional income.
Then again, I'm a single person so I imagine if I had a family to support the extra money would matter.
I went from $150K at the beginning of 2020 to around $225K working remotely. At $150K we could do anything we wanted (married grown children) to a point six months later we could do everything we wanted.
Meaning with $225K, we could:
- “retire my wife” at 45 so she could pursue her passions.
- max out my 401K (and soon catch up contributions) and max out my “after tax 401K” with 10% of my base
- go on multiple decent vacations a year.
- fly my wife out with me on business trips (on my dime) and stay over.
- “Date nights” once a week or so.
- stay in AirBnbs around the country for weeks at a time just for a change of scenery and work from there.
We had to balance those things before. Now we can do all of it.
If I made more, it would go toward my less conservative investments - real estate, opening a franchise, etc.
Just for clarification, we pay the employer’s side of FICA on RSUs and I am soon moving to a state that doesn’t tax income.
But why is there a belief that you work harder to get paid more? It was a lot more work being a senior dev/de facto “cloud architect” at a 60 person company where everyone look to me for guidance (in the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king) than it is being a mid level consultant at a 1.6 trillion dollar company.
The downside is that the city has very little income for infrastructure improvement/upkeep and education.
Just to be clear - we have to pay the employer side.
An increased marginal rate means an increased average rate, so (looking at it in an entirely equivalent way) all of your income does get taxed more, just not as by as much as the marginal increase. Arguing otherwise demonstrates either functional innumeracy or deceitfulness.
You’re just being overly pedantic.
That’s also not how any economist thinks of it.
Because it does. Stop being deceitful by pushing the free variable over to one extreme of all the extra tax being allocated to the margin. Literally any other allocation results in the conclusion that some additional tax is taken from the baseline income.
This is the natural way to look at it. When I get taxed throughout the year, I don't see my first $X get taxed at Y% and then the next %X' get taxed at %Y'; I see the whole lot get taxed at Z%, Y<Z<Y'. And at the end of the year, I don't see that I have paid Y% or Y'% of my income, I see that I have paid Z% of my income. Marginal tax rate is propaganda with no basis in reality. Average tax rate is the only meaningful number.
Marginal tax rate provides a convenient way to define a piecewise progressive tax curve which is continuous by construction, which is a nice property, but it is just a convenience. The function is still increasing everywhere above the negative tax cutoff. Every dollar earned does result in more taxes being paid on the whole income.