A decent 1BR on the peninsula (in San Mateo, Redwood City, Mountain View, etc.) is likely closer to >$2,500 a month plus $200/month for utilities/renters insurance. For transportation, I pay $200/month for a 15 year old Civic with liability insurance. If you have a moderately nice car that isn't paid off, you are going to pay >$200/month (especially if you commute daily). If you cook moderately nice meals and drink some alcohol, that food budget is likely going to be >$400/month. Plus going out to happy hour once a week, which isn't that uncommon, can easily cost you an extra $30-50 a week (or more). A good number of people have college debt as well, so add a monthly payment for that. I agree with you that saving is definitely possible when single and making >$100,000. I just think you low balled most of your numbers to prove your point.
If we're talking about low balled figures, I guess we need to consider the income side of the equation as well. The original question depends a good deal on what kind of job you're doing in the Bay Area. If it's someone coming to the Bay Area to work for Google/Facebook or similar, the figure I used is way too low, for example.
"A decent 1BR" - It all depends on the definition of decent. I pay $2k for a 1BR walking distance to Redwood City downtown/Caltrain.
But forget about renting an apartment, if you want to save and you're single, having roommates allows you to rent in the Peninsula for much less than $2k/mo.
Also, I added $300 discretionary spending which lets you to cover some of the things you described, and you're left with $8k at the end of the year.
Can you easily save $50k while spending $3k on rent+utilities to live in a fancy apartment in the Peninsula ? Maybe not, but you certainly don't need to be "eating garbage dumped by grocery stores".
> Maybe not, but you certainly don't need to be "eating garbage dumped by grocery stores".
Nice strawman :) I was specifically talking about the situation conditional on saving the 100k in 18 months, my comment was a response to the comment above it.
Separate point: your figures seem very low. I thought SF is roughly equivalent to NYC in terms of cost of living. In which case 300/mo is a zero off as an estimate for all food expenses.
