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$408,000. That's what SmartAsset says a family of four needs to earn to live comfortably in San Francisco, using the MIT Living Wage Calculator and a 50/30/20 split between needs, wants, and savings.
Read that cold and it sounds made up.
Read it next to what tech sales actually pays in that same city, and it stops sounding made up and starts sounding like the price of admission. I know couples in the Bay Area where both partners sell software, and their combined OTE clears $600,000. A teacher two blocks over making $75,000 isn't living the same life; his ceiling was set before he ever took the job. Yours isn't capped the same way.
The number was never the risk
The risk was never $408,000, or $371,000 in Oakland, or $369,000 in Boston. The risk is the AE who upgrades his lifestyle at exactly the rate his commission checks grow. Three years later he's clearing $400,000 a year and banking the same dollar amount he was banking at $150,000. Same trajectory, same effort, nothing to show for the difference.
An expensive territory is leverage, not a warning
If your territory happens to sit in one of the pricier markets, that's not a problem to solve around. It's leverage most of the country doesn't get. The same commission structure that clears $300,000 in San Francisco or Seattle can fund the next 30 years of your life, provided the money goes somewhere other than the lifestyle that matches it dollar for dollar.
If you want a plan for what to do with that gap before your next commission check turns into a car payment, grab 20 minutes on my calendar and we'll map out where every raise should go before it lands.
The reps who come out ahead three years from now aren't the ones who found some secret source of income. They just keep spending flat for 12 to 24 months after every jump, automate the difference into one high-yield savings reserve before it ever reaches checking, and let the new number prove itself before they build a life around it.
Three years from now, the number on your commission plan won't be what decides how you're doing. What you did with the gap will.
Is your spending already keeping pace with your commission, or still behind it?
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