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Comment by michael_miller | Hacker News Reader

The schools in Palo Alto itself are very good. Palo Alto HS has an excellent reputation amongst people I know. It's a bit of a pressure cooker, as everyone in the school has parents in the tech industry who care about education, but the quality of teaching is great.

The cost of living is another matter. A very basic starter home will in Palo Alto will run $1-2 million. Not unattainable for an engineer, but it will require some sacrifices.

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Not to nit-pick, but I'm curious about how a $1MM starter home is attainable for an engineer. For someone making let's say around $100,000/yr, your mortgage payment (assuming 4.5% is $5,000) is going to be at least 50% of your gross salary. That's a lot of sacrifice. The common formula is that you really don't want your total mortgage payment to exceed 28% of your gross income:

$5,000 * 12 / 0.28 = ~ $214,000/yr salary

I could see that for a very, very senior and specialized engineer working at one of a handful of companies, but that's probably double the norm in the 'Valley for your average 5-10 year experienced engineer.

Not to mention having to have $200,000 in cash for a down payment sitting around. Even if you saved as much as $1,000 a month, it would take you over 16 years to build up such a down payment--for a STARTER home!

It's attainable if you bet on the right startup and make it. Or if you bought it years ago. California doesn't re-asses property taxes unless you sell your property, which means that many people are paying tiny amounts of property tax on incredibly expensive homes. They just increase it by a small (less than inflation) amount per year, so effectively you pay less and less tax each year.

Key insight: old people vote.

2 engineers at 100k/yr gets you right to the figure you mentioned. $200K down payment is rough but not nearly impossible given the figure in the first sentence and willingness to maintain a college-ish lifestyle for a few years.

The norm is that both parents work, which changes the math substantially.

After including annual bonuses, ~214k is perfectly reasonable (on the low side if anything) for a good engineer with 5-10 years experience at google/facebook/apple/etc. Add in a second income and its easily feasible without bonuses. Million-dollar starter homes are obscene, but people actually do buy them.

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