Anyone who says $250,000/year isn't a lot of money is either stupid or they think we are

[Poll_Blind]

27. I think we're both in rare agreement here. I can only assume people who are...

...feeling pinched at 250K a year are living beyond their means. I have a bit of personal experience to base this on: I've known a lot of people (programmers) who went from making, say, $30K a year to $70k after landing a solid gig. I've known programmers making ~70K a year who jumped to over 100k when they got bumped up to project management or, for instance, take the helm as the CTO for a well-to-do startup.

Some of these people...would be basically broke. This is paraphrasing and condensing a hell of a lot of different anecdotes down, but we'd go out to lunch and they'd be basically ordering salads- or they'd be brown-bagging it to work couldn't afford to go out to lunch. For the longest time I could not get what the hell was up with these people because they were making such huge amounts of money (especially for where I live) and then as we had more interactions I came to realize that almost all of them had turned around after getting kicked into those higher-paying salaries and bought super expensive houses and new cars. One of them had a wife who hated him and over half his salary went up in smoke on overpriced crap from EBay. One of them decided he needed to have his own custom-built house and a stable for horses, then needed horses for his stable. He bought it all and that guy was on the hook for so much money every month it was unreal.

It was ridiculous.

But the basic story was they same: They'd all over-extended almost immediately after coming into more money. Almost all of them.

So there are people out there making $250k a year and feeling like paupers. I mean, I suppose, technically, I can see that be the case. But it's because they're so grossly, mightily overextended financially.

And that's not normal and it's not healthy, either psychologically or financially.

PB