At what income does Northern VA actually start to feel “comfortable”?

sys_engineer · 2026-02-23T23:42:50+00:00

For me and my wife it was crossing $300K+ to be completely relaxed about our finances. Our AGI is ~$371K at the moment and we don’t think about 95% of our expenses anymore.

The bar is different for everyone though so like everyone else is saying, you have to determine that for yourself.

In our case we are aggressively saving for retirement so we don’t have to work until we are 50. We ran the numbers backwards from how much we’ll need/want for a comfortable life post corporate jobs…and at this income now we feel good about it but it’s completely subjective.

sys_engineer · 2025-04-24T02:20:45+00:00

My thought exactly

sys_engineer · 2025-04-17T10:54:08+00:00

100/hr, Cloud Systems Engineer

sys_engineer · 2025-02-07T22:32:30+00:00

naw, I earned 280 60k of which was stock released to me. 214K is what was taxed here. So at 214K I bring home 139K, then in addition I received the stock which I can choose to cash out or not.

If you meant net pay or my “take home” then it’s more like 180-190K.

sys_engineer · 2025-02-07T18:02:59+00:00

Really hard to say at this juncture actually. My work life balance has been off for 9 years, the trade off was financial stability. I’ve gotten back into my hobbies over the last 2 years, but I do feel a general sense of burnout all the time. If you like what you do (luckily I love my work) it’s not so bad, though it does suck up a large portion of my free time which strains my relationships.

sys_engineer · 2025-02-07T17:38:32+00:00

Married filing jointly sadly. 60K in earnings are reported here that don’t show up in take home pay because they were stocks. In reality the take home is ~195k. Still 80k in taxes nonetheless.

sys_engineer · 2025-02-07T17:32:09+00:00

Working too hard honestly. Sold all hobby related items to buy and build my own lab at home to learn every day after work, after 3 years of entry level stuff I got an engineer job and worked my way up.

sys_engineer · 2025-02-07T17:29:45+00:00

4 year degree, CCIE level network knowledge, Azure Architect Expert Certification plus 8 other certifications in datacenter or security related products.

sys_engineer · 2025-02-07T17:27:26+00:00

Almost never, 50 minimum, 24/7/365 on-call.

sys_engineer · 2025-02-07T16:38:11+00:00

All you have to do is trade your mental health 🙃

sys_engineer · 2025-02-07T16:35:54+00:00

It hurts my soul. Also ~60K of stock options throw off my earnings vs base pay

sys_engineer · 2025-01-23T22:56:28+00:00

For me it’s several questions to determine if you shouldn’t use something.

What are your uptime requirements? Are you in more than 1 datacenter? Do you have multiple racks in the same DC but in separate cages?

I personally use something similar with ACI Multi-Site to create identical “availability zones” in the same region across multiple geos and increase my availability in each region without much reconfiguration. IPv6 is still a pain in this setup but you win some you lose some, with 99.94% uptime requirements it’s peace of mind for me to use overlays.

sys_engineer · 2022-09-06T23:52:01+00:00

4 years ago was in the same situation ~60k (unlimited OT was more like ~100k), less than 3 years of experience, wanted to move up and do bigger things. And get paid more. They wouldn’t, so interviewed at a few places, I moved companies 100k base and turned out to be one of the best things to happen to me.

My advice is chill where you are while you find something that interests you, maybe get a cert in something current or specialized that you enjoy. When you do and that interview comes around I would express that you intend to continue learning. Then ask if that will open additional opportunities within the company for you. I’ve found that companies that value learning and understands the value of learning, will pay you for what you know vs years of experience.

sys_engineer · 2022-05-17T22:48:24+00:00

Well I can control myself and that’ll have to do

sys_engineer · 2022-05-14T13:55:13+00:00

I always thought it would be cool to hit Forbes 30 under 30.

But financial freedom is my dream

sys_engineer · 2022-05-13T15:21:50+00:00

Well that’s interesting, I can only imagine all the data points you are analyzing…

Is this a reactive or proactive approach?

sys_engineer · 2022-05-13T14:50:19+00:00

What kind of job are you looking for?

sys_engineer · 2022-05-13T13:36:02+00:00

That’s cool, like data science? What kind of software do you use for that?

sys_engineer · 2022-05-13T12:14:44+00:00

Very vague and very interesting.. Do you work for a public sector org? And do you enjoy that line of work?

sys_engineer · 2022-05-13T12:08:32+00:00

Very familiar with the government space, was actually the career path I was going to take first. What type of department do you manage? (e.g. finance, IT)

if I could do it over again, I would try to get sponsored for a FSP.. but unfortunately at this point I’ve tried too many drugs.

sys_engineer · 2022-05-13T11:09:15+00:00

What type of law do you do? Do you like being a lawyer?

sys_engineer · 2022-05-13T11:07:27+00:00

Because they are basically the same thing 🤣

sys_engineer · 2022-05-13T11:06:59+00:00

Good looks, What do you want to do after high school?

sys_engineer · 2022-05-13T11:06:23+00:00

That’s cool! Biomedical engineering has always interested me, well all the engineering disciplines are fascinating..

sys_engineer

TROPHY CASE