Chapters

Intro

<aside> 💡 hook: Today I will be sharing my salary and expenses as a software engineer. Where I’ll breakdown my total compensation and how I allocate it, and also talk about my biggest expenses and how I manage them.

it’s no secret developers can make good money, but there’s something more important. I found that that bout 47.1% of people making more than $100,000 are still living paycheck to paycheck. So what’s more important now is to learn how to manage it.

also as you may know I’m in NYC but going to be doing this video from my situattion prior in Texas, because well I haven’t lived here long enough.

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Tracking Your Money

• [ ] Now -growing up money wasn’t something we talked about in my family, topics like investing and financial planning were foreign concepts. But my parent did teach me to be curious. So that’s what I did ad started to learn more on my own on how to best save, invest, and some good way to handle expenses for the long term. so overtime ended up gaining a pretty different perspective of money and how to value expenses.
• [ ] but of course I would say I’ve been very fortunate to find myself if a very rewarding field, though it wasn’t easy to break into, it was for sure worth the efforts
• [ ] so a very important part for me is using the right app to manage all of my data like money coming in and out, creating budgets and tracking your cash flow.
• [ ] I’ve used nice apps like Mint, Empower (formerly named personal capital) , and now I use Copilot.money. I really like copilot because it’s so fast, and feature packed but at the same time pretty intuitive. So whatever you end up using just try to stay consistent with it and keep it updated!

Software Engineer Salaries

• [ ] Now let’s look at the average pay for developers in the US and how it compares to TX. and after that we’ll get into my own total compensation. which as some of you may know I’m based out of Houston, tx. And location plays a huge factor into your living expenses, and your overall total compensation.

• [ ] starting off the median salary for software engineers in the united states is $170,000. And in Texas that’s about $135,000. btw For salary data like this I like to refere to both levels.fyi and glassdoor.com but let’s focus on levels website.

• [ ] I like levels because it quite literally provides salary info at different career levels in differnt companies for instance lets look here at google vs apple. You can see the different titles and average breakdowns.

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My Salary

• [ ] now to get into what I make in a year

• [ ] But rewinding a little here is a graph of my salary income overtime, starting from around 2020-2021 where I as more jr level engineer engineer. To now more recent 2022-23 where I would say I’m more intermediate level and maybe soon stepping into sr level in the coming years.

• [ ] so that’s my progression over time since I started really tracking my metrics, my very first job was actually as a coding teacher in a summer camp for kids, which was at 25 hr which seemed so good, while I was still in school.
• [ ] then my next job …
• [ ] now let me get into my current salaries breakdown and compensation package. starting with base salary of X. Then there’s bonus which is performance based and can range between x -x.
• [ ] next is equity which unfortunately I don’t get as this isn’t a publicly traded company. this is a big thing to consider among job opportunities you come across. And you also want to pay attention at the vesting period if a company does offer you equity