This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation for our Cost of Living video series with Devonte Duncan, 27, a software engineer living in Brooklyn, New York City. It has been edited for length and clarity.
When I started making six figures, I remember my friends and I would go out to eat, and the first thing I would do was say, “guys, I got it.” I would put my card down and pay for like 10 people.
That can’t be an all-the-time thing anymore. Dropping $300 on a bill every couple of weeks — it starts to add up.
I work as a software engineer, with an annual base salary of $159,000, and I live in Brooklyn, New York City, where I was born and raised.
Brooklyn feels like home to me. It has been a little disheartening to see the cost of living rise over the years. My family’s first apartment was rented for $900. Today, my apartment is up to $3,450.
That’s for my two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment with included parking that I share with my fiancée. Since I make more as a software engineer than she does as a school teacher, she contributes a flat $1,000, and I cover the remaining rent and around $500 a month of utility bills.
My monthly salary is $13,250, and my monthly take-home after tax and other contributions is $7,752. My only side income is from my YouTube channel, Dose of Devy, where I post day-in-the-life videos. At its peak, I was earning up to $400 a month. Now that I haven’t been posting as often, I earn around $100 a month. The upkeep is pretty cheap.
My relationship with money is a bit strained. I’ve had to learn the skills for dealing with it on my own. I didn’t understand how credit scores worked, how loans worked, or what it would even look like to buy a home, because nobody in my family actually owns one.
How I went from dropping out of college to making six figures
I was a physics major at City College for three years before I realized my experience there was becoming unsustainable. I took out a loan for about $2,000, because I was already working to pay for other expenses. The situation took a toll on my GPA, and I lost my merit scholarship.
That was when I realized it was time to drop out and find something else, leading me to the Marcy Lab School, a year-long software engineering fellowship. I didn’t tell my parents because the last thing you want to tell a bunch of Caribbean immigrants — who came here so their kids can have a better life — is that you dropped out of college.
Eventually, they found out, and I graduated from the Marcy Lab School. My first job out of the fellowship, I was making almost six figures.
Even then, my mom was still like: “Oh, but you still need a degree. They’ll probably pay you more.” Yet, I don’t have any plans to go back to college. My plans are just to figure out how to make more money.
My expenses, from transportation to groceries and hobbies
I own a 2019 Subaru Outback that I am currently financing because I traded in my old 2021 Tesla Model 3 to Carvana at a loss. My monthly car payment is $450, insurance is $208, and I spend around $90 on gas. I also spend around $50 a month on the MTA when I go into the city, since I don’t want to pay congestion pricing or street parking.
Typically, I’m spending $600 on food, that’s about $400 for grocery shopping and $200 for eating out. When I was shopping for myself, eating out cost almost as much as groceries because food had gotten so expensive. Now that I’m in a relationship, cooking at home is a little cheaper because the meals we make last us several days.
I have a short but fun list of hobbies. The first, and most expensive, is building my passion project, OpenBorough.NYC, a civic dashboard that keeps New Yorkers informed about local politics. The total I spend can go up to $300 a month. I also spent up to $300 on video games over the last three years.
I don’t typically have a hard budget when it comes to travel. Earlier this year, I spent $3,000 on a two-week trip to Japan. I also went to a Bad Bunny concert in Brazil. That did cost a pretty penny, but it was worth it.
I have a Planet Fitness membership for about $40 a month, but I don’t actually go because the building I live in now has a gym. One day, I’ll get around to canceling that membership.
Putting friction between me and my money
Back when I was at my peak spending — paying for everybody’s dinner, going on crazy trips, and buying random things like an electric skateboard — I realized I had racked up a lot of debt. I kept fighting with lifestyle creep.
I decided to take out a debt consolidation loan for about $30,000. That runs me about $947 a month. If I had kept paying the credit cards, I would have paid nearly 25% interest on each. The consolidation loan is about 17%, so I’m paying much less interest overall. In two years, it will be completely paid off.
The lesson I took away from racking up debt was that just because you make more money doesn’t mean you have to spend more money.
Since I am not super financially disciplined, I developed a system that does the work for me.
With every paycheck, I set aside 10% in my savings account, which comes to about $700 a month. In my mind, the savings account does not exist. I do better when I put friction between me and my money. I then have another bank account I use to pay my bills and transfer my monthly budget for things like food into a separate account. From my 401(k), I get a 4% employer match, and I max it out at also 10% contribution. Annually, I’m saving about $15,900.
I currently don’t have any savings goals outside of saving 10% of my salary, because I realized you can’t save your way out of poverty. The price of things is going up way faster than my wages are. And so, once I’m debt-free, I’m going to continue to save, but I’m going to invest a lot of my money in myself and my ideas, in hopes that someday they turn into something that can help me live my dreams.
If I had to decide whether living in New York is worth the cost, I think it depends almost entirely on who you are and what you’re here for. Everyone who lives here and grew up here is kind of just fighting to stay home.
Now I go out to eat a lot less, and I hang out with less friends because I know I’ve already set the trend of I’m picking up the tab — and I don’t want to do that anymore because it’s super expensive.
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