Editor’s note: This story originally ran in 2019 but has been updated with the numbers for 2021.

With an average home price of $ 300,000 in the U.S., you can achieve the idealized middle class lifestyle on salaries in the six-figure range or above in most parts of the country.

In San Francisco’s $ 2 million fixer-upper country, the income needed to achieve that status is obviously higher. But how much more?

SF-based financial expert Sam Dogen pegged that number at $ 300,000 after surveying dozen of readers on his Financial Samurai blog asking about their income and expenses living in the notoriously high-priced coastal towns.

With her feedback, Dogen has broken down the budget of a couple with one or two children in San Francisco, Seattle, or New York. He found that $ 300,000 is the income necessary to invest in retirement, save up for your child’s education, own a three-bedroom home, take three weeks off a year, and be at a decent age To retire.

“It’s not an extravagant lifestyle,” says Dogen. “It’s a middle class lifestyle, considering that a middle class person can afford a modest home, have at least one car, have a child or two. There are no private jets in this budget. “

Financial samurai personal finance blogger Sam Dogen breaks down the budget for a family of four with a household income of $ 300,000 who live in a coastal city like San Francisco or New York.

Financial samurai / courtesy

Dogen has put together an in-depth post where you can find analysis and explanation of each issue, but here are a few points to keep in mind:

– The $ 29,400 per year childcare cost takes into account a babysitting rate of around $ 20 an hour, the standard rate in a city like San Francisco. Preschool costs easily $ 18,000 to $ 20,000 a year in metropolitan areas.
The mortgage is based on a $ 1.5 million, 1,750-square-foot, three-bedroom, two-bathroom home on a 2,500-square-foot lot.
—The cost of a car is based on a single car that houses a family.
—Entertainment bills include everything from Netflix to tickets to the occasional ball game to meeting, which can easily cost $ 200 in San Francisco when you factor in dinner and babysitting expenses.

Dogen adds that a family on $ 300,000 is still living from paycheck to paycheck, not saving outside of their 401K and 529 plans.

“We’re in this eternal urge in San Francisco, and it’s a city for people who are willing to rush,” he says. “Before, $ 300,000 was a lot of money. At that amount, you will likely have to work long hours and struggle to keep up. “

His recommendation is to make moving out of the region your goal.

“There is a shortage of moving trucks in places like San Francisco because so many people are moving out of this expensive city and other expensive coastal cities,” he writes. “If you live in an expensive metropolitan area, consider moving to cut your cost of living, or at least try to capitalize on the valuation difference by investing in Central America.

“With technology, you won’t have to grind as hard in cities where the average home price is over $ 1 million.”

The post How making $300,000 in San Francisco can nonetheless imply you are residing paycheck-to-paycheck appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

“There were dozens of hypotheses and basically no one took any of them seriously.”

That is, until Berkeley scientists – led by Luis Alvarez (a Nobel laureate in physics) and his son geologist Walter Alvarez – came up with the idea that the earth was struck by a meteorite or comet the size of San Francisco.

The theory and its supporters received a major boost a few years later with the discovery of a 110-mile-wide crater on what is now Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.

“With the discovery of the smoking weapon, the fact that there was a large meteorite became widely accepted,” Marshall said. “So it started to develop into the two hypotheses on meteorite versus volcanism.”

Charles Marshall examines a cast of a bird related to puffins and the great auk found in the Monterey Formation in southern California. (Daniel Potter / KQED)

In fact, volcanoes have been difficult to keep off the list of known suspects. Hundreds of millions of years ago, every other major extinction (with the exception of today’s) was associated with volcanism.

Around the same time as the meteor strike and the disappearance of dinosaurs from the fossil record (along with many species to tiny marine life), there was also a massive wave of volcanic activity in India – in a place known as the Deccan Traps.

Scientists have been arguing back and forth for years: Impact! Volcanoes! Impact! …

Until recently, when Berkeley geophysicist Mark Richards offered this idea: “I realized that the size of the impact is probably large enough to have triggered volcanic systems around the planet.”

Bigger than big

Richards calculated that the energy of a rock the size of Mount Everest from space was enough to trigger an 11-magnitude quake. This is not a typo. When I told Richards that I thought the scale would only go up to 10, he told me that it was actually not true.

In terms of earthquakes, 10+ is a nightmare. Such a quake would be a hundred times worse than the “big one” that hit San Francisco in 1906. Richards says it shook the globe – even the volcanoes on the other side of the world in India.

A relative of today’s Komodo dragon, the owner of this skull (left), wore flippers and could grow to be more than 20 feet long. To the right in Charles Marshall’s laboratory sits an Allosaurus foot. (Daniel Potter / KQED)

“So the idea is that the impact may have put the system into high gear.”

Richards carefully says that if he’s right and the two events are linked, we still don’t know exactly what killed the dinosaurs. Rather, the proposal points the way for a new investigation, says Paul Renne, director of the Berkeley Geochronology Center and co-author of Richards’ paper.

“We just have to give up the thought that it is one thing or the other,” said Renne.

Both the impact itself and a volcanic wave would have the potential to trigger massive eruptions of noxious gases that lead to sharp temperature fluctuations.

One factor could have been the release of CO2, for example from so much vaporized limestone, which, along with other greenhouse gases, leads to a long-term warming effect.

India’s Deccan Traps, described by geologists as a “great igneous province,” were formed over hundreds of thousands of years as layer upon layer of lava flowed and cooled, around the same time the dinosaurs died. (Paul Renne / BGC)

Renne says there could also have been an abundance of sulfate aerosols, “which, when released into the atmosphere, can actually reflect enough sunlight, causing cooling.”

In fact, one could argue for a double event – first sudden cooling, followed by a long, hot period from the greenhouse effect. Whether the dinosaurs died in a single bad weekend, or the lifespan of an animal when the food web collapsed, or several millennia, remains unclear.

“The potential effects of an impact or massive volcanism can be the same in many ways. The symptoms would be indistinguishable, ”says Renne.

Increase in precision

In order to better understand the effects and their possible connection with the eruptions in India, a narrower data range will be determined in the next step. For Renne, this means using a basement room full of mass spectrometers to test rocks from the Deccan traps. In the hallway in front of his office, canvas sacks full of such stones are piled up.

“I am a rock lover and I have a lot of beautiful rocks and large crystals. These are some of the ugliest rocks you will ever see, ”said Renne, pulling out a sample that, to my untrained eye, might as well have been gravel from a nearby quarry.

A fossilized pteranodon hovers over the Tyrannosaurus Rex in the Museum of Paleontology at the University of California at Berkeley. (Daniel Potter / KQED)

Dating these rocks is a slow process, with a few tens of milligrams shipped from the state to be irradiated and then sent back for testing. It can take months.

Nearby is a wood-paneled room that houses a magnetometer – another tool for dating prehistoric rocks. This is the Courtney Sprain’s specialty; She is a Ph.D. Student who also wrote Richards’ paper.

Sprain spends part of the summer in Montana collecting samples from coal seams and has told me that at the end of each day she resembles a chimney sweep.

When the Earth’s magnetic core shifts (we’re not sure why this is happening) it leaves a record in the rock. Sprain teases these cues to refine the timescale.

“We get an accuracy of 20,000 years,” she says, “while before it was 500,000, a million.”

Really ideal, albeit unrealistic, would be the accuracy up to the day of the week the impact occurred. But it would be helpful to bring it under 10,000 years.

Geologist Eldridge Moores, a distinguished professor emeritus at UC Davis known for his role in the John McPhee book “Assembling California,” says it is like a detective trying to find out the exact time someone died.

“You have to know that – this is essential information before you can answer the next question, that’s why. The same goes for the dinosaurs. “

Moores was sitting with me in his Davis house, a copy of Mark Richards’ newspaper on the dining table in front of him, when I asked him: Do we know what killed the dinosaurs?

The post If You Suppose You Perceive the Loss of life of the Dinosaurs, You’re Flawed appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.