How I Spent My ENTIRE FAANG Software Engineer Salary & Bonus

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Some people think that if you are a software engineer at a FANNG company you are on the roads to riches, partying up in luxury mansions and cars. Actually, I’m not sure if anyone still thinks that nowadays especially since I recently made a video about how poor the tech industry is doing, but I do find this incredible accurate given that I live with roommates and drive a honda civic. Anyhow today, I will be making a fun video about how much I make as a software engineer and what I spend all that money on.

Now a quick google search says that I can share my income, but just to make it more generalizable there are sites like levels fyi that show what software engineers make. Based on public information in this site, it says that amazon software engineers entry level make around 120K base salary, 35K stock and 10K bonus per year. This is quite similar across microsoft, google, and facebook.

Okay just to keep things simple and generalizable let’s say for an average junior FANNG company engineer, they are making 120K base, 30K stock and 20K bonus.

So based on that number the annual income would be 170K.

I got chatgpt to calculate the very expensive federal and provincial taxes in Canada. The higher salary you have the higher you tax bracket you are in. This leaves you with an annual base salary of .

Often times you will also contribute some to your 401k Or in Canada we call it RRSP. So if you contribute 5% thats about 300 dollars per month.

This leaves you a monthly take home pay of close to 7000 dollars

I’m neglecting the stocks because that just gets put into your account and you kind of dont think about it too much. But I will say for bonus and stock they assume you are in the top tax bracket so pretty much half of it is cut from taxes.

This leaves you an annual pay of.

Okay part 2 my monthly expenses.

Remember the luxury mansiions and cars. Yeah that’s not happening. I live in 2 bedroom apartment where my rent is 1600$ for my half, food and groceries every month come at about 1000$. I was sactually surprised to see that. Especially since when I was a stsudent I would spend like 30 dollars week, which was 7 dollars for pork chicken, another 10 dollars for some stir fry veggies, and then 13$ for snacks and random discount items. Occasionally I would splurge and get some McDonald’s.

But now I’ve gone from 120 dollars a month, to 1000 which is like 1000% increase.

Okay moving on utilies including internet, this is pretty good, usually costs about 70 dollars split. We also have reimbursement for our phone bills since we have to be oncall, so I have not added there.

Finally my student loans is 260$ a month. The way it works in Canada is the provicinal student loans you are subject to a pretty high it is the prime rate + 1%. So I essentially paid all 50k of that I wasn’t really spending that much and I had scholarships, but I still have almost 50K in federal student loans which are interest free. That by definition is good debt, free money that I can use to invest so I keep it and pay that amount per month. Definitely in a really blessed position to just pay that off myself, but leaves you thinking about the debt we are leaving kids with.

That leaves my investment which I have been contributing a fair amount, until recently.

Finally we have irresponsible stuff:

I budgeted about 500 here per month. So that’ll be stuff like recently I bought this pixel. I already have an iphone and a pixel 7a but this was on sale so I had to get it. I decided to give my pixel 7a to my mom, I was thinking this is a strategic investment because then she is now part of the android ecosystem where it is much cheaper. plus it can wirelessly charge my iphone so it is quite awesome.

I also went on a spontaneous trip to trader joes this month and splurge like 100 dollars on random snacks and sunscreen. My rayban glasses also got smashed play soccer so I got these ones online for about 100$, which are sick.

Okay let me move on, transportation mine is really cheap for fuel and insurance because I drive a honda civic. I love that car though my parents took it to go to Vancouver Island recently so I’ve been asking them to give me minute by minute updates on the car condition.

Here’s where I messed up. I recently bought a condo with chatgpt. I made a video about it. They have this phase where it is ready to move in but not officially closed for new builds. I am paying 4000$ in the meantime it is crazy.

Finally I spend maybe 800$ for travel. I did go to Japan with recently and made a bunch of videos that got no views.

This leaves the grand total spending to over 10K per month.