They are greatly exaggerating. One tangible advantage to living somewhere expensive with higher salaries is that anything you can buy online is effectively that much cheaper. An iPhone costs the same in Arkansas as in San Jose, so you'd end up working many more hours to buy one in AR than in CA, on average.

Yes, housing is more expensive. A lot more. Everything else is way cheaper.

Services are also more expensive because the person performing the service must pay the high rents, too.

Not proportionally more, in my experience, and surely not for people moving here for the kinds of jobs we’re talking about.

Thank you, so many people like to go about cost-of-living and pretending things are equal because of that, but the vast majority of goods people buy are not priced that way, and in truly remote places the cost of goods actually go up. The land or housing might be cheap, but pretty much everything else costs the same, so the lower paying job still hurts.

I would say the vast majority of spending is affected by COL, since it’s all incorporating price of labor. Maybe not the majority of goods but that’s often a smaller part of spending.

I will say though that travel is the main one that’s obviously independent of where you live (at least mostly). So that’s kind of nice.

The trick is to rent cheap and live like a college student in SF/bay area while young, save aggressively, invest intelligently, then move somewhere comfortable but more affordable (CO's front range is lovely) for your 30s/40s.

Just watch you don't get overly acclimated to the weather, or you'll end up with a single-digit number of cities in the world you find comfortable

I'm so so so glad I didn't spend my twenties working and saving.

I've lived a thousand lives, spent most of the time as true quality time with people I love, and I still have a few years left in this decade of my life.

And I'm still further ahead, financially speaking, than >99% of other people my age. (To those asking, I tripled down on life after getting a remote job.)

The one year I spent 9-5 in an office as a traditional SWE was by far the quickest and least eventful year of my life. Also probably the saddest.

I'm very glad I just said "no" and walked away and simply lived. It was absolutely worth the risk. I would never trade these years for the ability to buy a house in the Bay Area suburbs.

I probably will be able to do that anyways, if I want to, even though I don't.

I forgot to factor in the time/quality of life cost of dealing with snow, winter heating, shoveling drive/roof, driving and driving risk.