Seattle

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After I graduate from college, I plan to be a geologist. I also have a dream of living in Seattle.

Unfortunately, the cost of living in Seattle is very high. How can I afford to live in Seattle on a geologist's salary, without winning the lottery?

Tim

Why on earth would you want to live in Sea. I did 15 years there (used it as a base for my technical consulting business in the Orient) and finally retired to Florida…I couldn’t afford the Prozac. They call Seattle/Washington state “The Peoples Soviet Of Washington” in Washington D.C…..It’s so mindlessly liberal there it makes Mass. look like a right wing hotbed. The whole place is a smoke and mirrors con job (a long tradition going back to the Klondike gold rush), the cost of living is outrageous because the taxes are outrageous, the educational standards are abysmal (45% of public school teachers send their kids to private school), the weather is god awful (try not seeing the sun for 5 months straight!)…even Boeing pulled out (or rather was taxed out because its workers couldn’t afford to live there).
There’s lots of neat places that need geologists…South America, Africa etc…. big money too. I have a Canadian friend who’s a geo in Mali, he only works 6 months a year and makes $200,000…and gets all his expenses paid while he is working. He has a house and yacht in Dakar and a home on Vancouver Island, BC. I know this is true because I just returned from sailing my boat there and moored at his yacht club (Hann CVD) and stayed at his house in pointe E (Dakar suburb). Also I’ve sailed to his town in BC and know he’s from there. Tim a young guy with a geo degree has lots of opportunities to see the world and make a great life, look around buddy, it’s all out there. BTW learn some French and some Spanish, it will be a big help and will make you precious to most western companies.
P.S. Good luck at school, I missed your other post and feel bad about not wishing you the best.

The term "sugar daddy" springs to mind.

Sorry for the unhelpful reply, just offering a little trite humor.

double postie

I first lived in Seattle in early 1970 and engaged in a lot of political street action protesting the war in Vietnam, Seattle had been a wide open city in the 1930's and they had a general workers strike and shut down the whole city, so marching in the streets in 1970 was pretty well tolerated until the bemused police were told to shut it down and we started rioting up Capitol Hill, trashing the land mark Safeway and we all ate pretty good that night! (those of us who were not sluicing tear gas out of our eyes. . )

I lived there again in the later 70's and then even later in the early 1980's when it was a Boeing Ghostown. There was a huge billboard that shouted "WOULD THE LAST PERSON LEAVING SEATTLE PLEASE TURN OUT THE LIGHTS?" I liked Seattle long before the towering SeaFirst -Gates family got their fingers in so many pies.

I suppose it is different now, but the crisp breeze over the sound, the ferries out to Bremerton, Pike Place and all the rounded hills ( they actually used huge fire hoses with water from Lake Washington to blast the hills into gently rolling slopes, rather than perch on the sides of them like in SanFrancisco.) I love Seattle. . .

Merle

Condos 15-20 miles away in the suburbs are affordable, as are stand alone homes. There are alot of condo conversions going on (i.e. rentals get new carpet, paint, and plumbing fixtures and are suddenly condominium-grade), those are relatively inexpensive if you consider $200k reasonable. That's maybe 800 sq. ft. Huge generalization though. I saw a 600 sq. ft. studio condo in an 80-year-old, beautiful, brick building at $165k, but that was in Tacoma. A 2 bedroom unit with a view of Puget Sound in that same building is probably $350k. A 1,500 sq. ft. restored Victorian in that same neighborhood is probably $400k; a 1,500 sq. ft. crack house in that same neighborhood is $250k. And that's Tacoma. Add 50 - 100% minimum to those Tacoma #'s and you can approximate Seattle's

My best advice: The Kent or Puyallup Valley's or Tacoma and Federal Way. The Valley's have daily commuter rail service that begins in Tacoma with parking garages at all the stations on the way. It takes you right into Downtown Seattle. There are also many express busses that actually go from where people live to where people work (suburb to suburb for instance), or just drive. Federal way by car is perhaps a tolerable 45 minutes, up to an hour if it's raining. No train from Federal Way, but a raft of express busses at single-digit minute intervals.

If you can tolerate 'inner suburban' living, you can find affordable housing. Don't forget there are also the typical dives, and '1st apartment'-type buildings around. Also lots of room rentals for college students etc, and house sharing, if you must live in the city.

[I'm no realtor or real estate expert, these are just observations as I've lived in the area for decades and am looking to relocate myself. I can't afford to purchase the house I grew up in, but I'm trying]

Consider Portland as well. That's good advice. It compares well to Seattle and I believe the housing is a bit less expensive.

If you want to experience something truly amazing, visit Vancouver, B.C. Just spectacular. Take a tour up from Eugene, end up in Vancouver.

Just some thoughts and probably a little too much "know it all" information.

I think you'll be alright. If you can afford a $200k condo, townhouse, house and a minimum one-hour to 90-minute commute to Seattle, you will have no problem.

Unleaded today: $2.69

My current commute is 20 minutes by car. If this commute you speak of is by train or light rail, then it may not be a problem.

Tim

Kit,

Is the $200,000 job in U.S. dollars or Canadian dollars?

Tim

Tim
Euros, sorry I can’t find the Euro symbol on my computer.

BTW Burro is right Oregon is a much better deal, low simple taxes (they can’t by law have a surplus and must return any surplus to the citizens, unlike WA which has a +1 Billion $ surplus). I forgot to mention that when I lived in Sea I spent almost half my time traveling in Asia. I kept my boat is Sea so I had easy access to sail to Alaska and B.C. So I had a pretty good feel for the costs of operating around the Pacific Rim. I also had a house in Sea. It was a 740 sq foot 2 bedroom bungalow on a 40 ft wide lot in a working class neighborhood, near Boeing Field, nothing special. I paid $150,000 for it in 1994. When I left in 2002 the taxes on it were $4700 a year! And they didn’t even pick the trash up. I had to pay another $70 a month for that. That house was a better investment for the government than it was for me. The same thing in Portland would probably be similarly priced but the taxes would be a lot lower (probably half)…think about it, in ten years that over $20,000 less.

Tim
Also, AnonymousAnonymous is right, OSU is a great school, I did a lot of work there with their chem and physics departments...world class. I'm certain their geo people are the same. Corvallis is a neat town.

I thought Geologists made a lot of money, so how would living in Seattle be a big problem?

Geologists are currently starting out around $75,000 per year, but I read that the average house cost in Seattle is over $400,000.

In Houston, where I'm from, the average house is about $150,000.

I thought about attending the University of Washington, but it would have been too expensive. Incidentally, I was accepted to the University of Hawaii last year--but it was also too expensive, and I didn't know where Honolulu ranked as far as liberal or conservative went.

Tim