If you're making $100K in Pittsburgh, you're doing quite well. And you might want to increase your salary by a tremendous amount, perhaps 5x-10x because obviously some costs don't change, to justify moving to Palo Alto and buying real estate. (Yes, there are other places to live in Silicon Valley, but speaking as a homeowner here, there aren't any that are non-coastal cheap.)
In Pittsburgh the median sale price for a house is $129,000, according to Trulia.
In Palo Alto the median sale price is 17x higher, about $2.2 million, with significant yoy increases: http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2013/12/24/real-estate-ma.... "In
If you're making $100K in Pittsburgh, you're doing quite well. And you might want to increase your salary by a tremendous amount, perhaps 5x-10x because obviously some costs don't change, to justify moving to Palo Alto and buying real estate. (Yes, there are other places to live in Silicon Valley, but speaking as a homeowner here, there aren't any that are non-coastal cheap.)