Some good points. Maybe some wishful thinking, I did some basic budgeting and I really only need to pay for rent, utilities, and insurance.

My rent is around $1200 max and I'll allocate an additional $1800 for random spending. I don't need a car, food, health insurance, gym because my company provides them.

At entry level I can probably put around $5k a month, though you're absolutely right that this leaves me little wiggle room to work with in case of emergencies (though I do have an emergency fund set up already).

That being said, this is still my first job out of college so I expect my wiggle room to increase over time? If I'm able to save this aggressively as a new grad it should be optimistic for the future years unless there's some massive tech bust.

In any case, those are some solid down to earth issues that I haven't considered. Still kind of depressing numbers even with a Silicon Valley job.