I make 120k and I could only afford my wife not being at work for 2 months. I don't live in a HCOL area. Nearly everyone I know that makes a household income of around 100k right now struggles, and that is with mortgage payments closer to the 1000k mark than my closer to 2000k mark. I'm in my 30's and just bought a home recently, like many my age.
We had to budget hard, food cost in general is high. Add a baby to that, it really hit home. Wife pumped, and it helped offset cost in the first few months. But luckily Wife was able to get back to work in only two months time. I would have loved 6-12 months for her to be at home. But America sucks, and I would need to pretty much make 180k to justify it.
My husband makes about what you do, but I was still pulling in 2k a month on maternity leave: 1800 in Elternzeit (parental leave) pay, plus 200 in Kindergeld (child benefit), so we were fine. We also only had one paid-off, liability-only insured old car and our rather moderate mortgage to contend with.
To be fair, Germany got an awful lot of income tax out of me the ten years previous that I might have otherwise saved and invested, but I’m ok with this - this system means that long maternity leaves are expected and more easily accommodated, and two months of paternal leave is considered doing your minimal fatherly duty.
I will add that our kid is in 500 EUR/mo daycare, even with parents pulling down 1.5 engineering/IT salaries.
The 0.5 is the 20 hour work week my employer was obliged to let me choose during the first 3 years of my kid’s life. After that, I can convert my contract permanently to part-time, or go back to full-time. They can choose to be more flexible, but that’s their minimum obligation. None of my female friends back home in the States has managed to stay in a technically/professionally-demanding job only part-time after kids: they either drop out of paid employment entirely, do something they’re overqualified for part-time, or deal with 40+ hour workweeks to keep doing what they’re good at.
Playing Video Games, Smoking Weed, Jerkin Off, etc isn't going to get your life on track.
I'm a traveling controls engineer, systems integrator, it is not a easy life. I've had plenty of burnout moments, those 100hr weeks where you worked everyday just getting the job done. As that is what needs to happen when a scheduled shutdown of a facility that pulls in over a million dollars a day is non operational. Falling behind is not an option. Luckily for me I've had pretty good luck for the most part and have always been on top of things.
But issues do happen, like the electrician landing 120v to a analog card that the lead times for makes it unobtanium. And with that the old VFD's that relied on that card for a return speed reference. In those times using generic remote IO you had in your truck with a analog card can get things up and running, and make you look like a hero. But going without sleep to get it workin is not enjoyable. Anyone that knows AB Hardware and its shitty support of Modbus would know. Using a add-on you've never used, as you'd normally use a red lion in this use case.
My body aches all the time. and I always have a full work load. On top of three kids at home.
There is no excuse to being lazy. Even pain. Disability is min wage, it is a sad shitty life. My wife's mom is disabled, she has to live on what would be considered poverty wages. She doesn't do anything with her life, and she can't drive because of said disability.
Get to the Gym, get a job, get life back on track.
If you are done with programming, deliver pizza.
My best friend is a full stack web dev, but he too would rather not work as the idea of having day to day responsibilities is too much. He moved homes a year ago, and it still looks like he moved last week. Issue? he smokes pot non stop and gets by on minimal contract work while his wife bring in 80% of the income.
X11 was designed for use as a remote session. Largely built for Unix, these Unix machines we largely accessed remotely. Local Machines were not as powerful as the mini computers of the time that would run the more heavy duty applications.
Honestly it really wasn't until SGI and NeXT did we see powerful mini computers on the desk running GUI applications in the 90s.
X11 is due for a replacement, but users just dont want to let go. Linux GUI based applications are still a small user base compared to the headless nature Linux normally gets used for.
For every 1 GNU GUI using Linux user, there are 100+ Linux installs that run completely headless. So the demand to move to Wayland is small.
The ESXI UI is vastly cleaner and more VM Focused. The network stack is easier to work with, and setting up passthrough is dead easy. A big plus to ESXI is how easy it is to export a VM and move it to another machine. The Export/Import method on Proxmox sucks, and all CLI. Plus there are a lot of premade VMware images out there that spool up in minuets on ESXI, getting them up and running on proxmox is a chore.
Proxmox is not bad if doing everything from scratch in Proxmox, and you don't need to move VMs arount.
Plus don't get me started on lack of a filebrowser on proxmox.
Performance is better with ESXI anyways. Only downside to ESXI is hardware limitations.
A home is a savings account on its own. Much like investments, a home's value nearly always goes up with the times as long as it is kept up. So much like a 401k the value increases over time, but paying a mortgage is like paying yourself while also paying the bank. The bank gets their interest rate cut, but the actual paying off the home is you paying you in the future.
So while a mortgage vs rent may be pretty close ATM if you are new home buyer (Yeah I wish I was able to buy a home 10 years ago..), your mortgage is putting money into your home as a savings account. And if you ever need some of that money for whatever reason, you refinance. It is real nice and easy
Any buying in a down market is ALWAYS better for a younger generation.
S&P500 still has a 10y avg of 11-12%, that means every year that is the avg return. Even if there was 2-3 bad years, the 7-8 good years make up for it... So in 30 years time, it doesn't mater if we had a few bad years of -20% declines. You are still up massively.
Young people have such a lack of understanding when it comes to the stock market and it shows.
If your 401k only avg %5 return per year over a 30y span, you picked the wrong investment methods. Too much in bonds..
Still you should be taking advantage of employer match. Pretty much every employer has a 401k program, use it. SS will be there, but you don't want that to be your life line. Sadly Gen X didn't really understand 401ks, they got them later in life and many didn't fund them correctly. It isn't uncommon to see genXers take money from the 401k later in life with a hit, and it will be on their family to take care of them when SS isn't enough.
Pretty much every job offers a 401k, so not saving is akin to not having a job...
Considering the youngest millennials are in their late 20s, and the majority of us are in our 30s. There are a good amount of us that moved up in our career paths and bought a home. Considering most buy a home in their 30s-40s, that is where more millennials already sit. What currently sucks is us younger millennials are not enjoying the cheap mortgages the older millennials are enjoying.
What really sucks is you pretty much need two incomes to make it work. You can easily get a job making 50k a year no problem. But that doesn't give you much these days. I make 80k and if it wasn't for my partner I would be paycheck to paycheck, and with kids out combine paycheck is still paycheck to paycheck. 110k doesnt do the trick. You pretty much need a household income of 150k to start having a okay life.
I remember the first large crypto wave, when bitcoin shortly shot over $1k. Just for it to sit under $300 for around few years before bouncing back... And bounce back it did.
I'm sorry but people like this have no idea what they are talking about.
Crypto will go back up, it may be 3 years from now who knows.
I make 120k and I could only afford my wife not being at work for 2 months. I don't live in a HCOL area. Nearly everyone I know that makes a household income of around 100k right now struggles, and that is with mortgage payments closer to the 1000k mark than my closer to 2000k mark. I'm in my 30's and just bought a home recently, like many my age.
We had to budget hard, food cost in general is high. Add a baby to that, it really hit home. Wife pumped, and it helped offset cost in the first few months. But luckily Wife was able to get back to work in only two months time. I would have loved 6-12 months for her to be at home. But America sucks, and I would need to pretty much make 180k to justify it.