At 90k in NYC you can easily cover a nice 3k / month 1br apartment and have ~2,000$ / month leftover which is enough to cover expenses and have solid savings.
No landlord is going to rent you a 3k/mo apartment on a 90k salary. Most require your gross annual income to be at minimum 40x the monthly rent, ie $120,000.
The whole point of living in a top-tier city like New York is to experience it and enjoy it. Living like an austere hermit isn't the way to do that in NYC, where so much of the scene revolves around putting expensive things in your mouth in front of other people. Maybe on the West Coast, where people can ride bikes without being ground to paste by ten ton trucks running red lights and walk down elegant boulevards that aren't carpeted with human waste, you can live frugally and experience a good life in the city. But not here.
Fair point. We definitely have more trash though. So much of it. Frozen great mounds of snow-covered hepatitis in winter, and stinking black fermenting vessels full of distilled evil in the summer.
Please. Everything here is either worse or better than it is everywhere else. That's why the whole of the rest of the world without any exception at all is in absolute awe of New York. :)
I don't know amount most places, but Archstone (http://www.archstoneapartments.com/) was willing to rent me a 3k apartment while I was making 70k. I had a roommate that was going to move in in a month, but they did not care when I was signing the lease. They also have apartments in NYC so the option is open.
At $90K in NYC you're taking home about $58,500, or $4875/month. Spend $3k/month on rent and you're left with $468/wk for everything else in your life. Half of that can easily go towards feeding yourself in NYC.
Hmm, according to www.paycheckcity.com 90k = $5,014.58 / month after taxes which is significantly more tax than I was expecting. However, if you think 33$ on food per day is necessary your clearly doing something wrong. Learn to cook or buy more normal food or something?
A big aspect of the NYC lifestyle is having very little space or stuff at home and living your life outside the home. Most New Yorkers don't have what anyone in the first world would consider a kitchen... at best you've got a two-burner stovetop, a toaster-oven-sized oven, maybe a microwave, a miniature refrigerator, a tiny sink, and a few square feet of counterspace. And one or two plates. Most of your meals come from the huge assortment of restaurants and delis that fill all NYC neighborhoods.
For many years I lived in NJ and worked in NYC, and I typically spent $20/day for a bagel and coffee in the morning and take-out lunch from a local shop. That's not exactly an extravagant lifestyle.
$33 dollars per day is not "wrong". A bottle of drink costs $4. Coffee or Tea? Egg sandwich? Noodle soup lunch special? $10 A few beers with friends? God forbid a date? Popcorn at the movies? Takeout indian or sushi? Oh and buying a steak on sale and freezing it at the same time..
Is there a law against bag lunches in NYC? Needs and wants are not the same thing. Refusing the acknowledge that is a big reason so many people with comfortably middle/upper-middle incomes can "barely make ends meet", since as their income goes up so do the "requirements" of their lifestyles...
Is spending 60% of your take home pay on an apartment commonplace in New York? I realize the cost of housing in NYC is very high but I guess I assumed most of the people living in the city were making more than 90k.
People usually spend half their paycheck on rent. It's not too bad considering you don't need a car, especially if you are a couple living together. In the rest of the US you'd each need a car which is easily $800/mo when you account for depreciation, maintenance, gas, insurance, and misc costs.
Edit: used wrong calculator.