What's a realistic number in your opinion?
I managed to save about 100k per year in Denver and Salt Lake City with mid tier tech and govt lab jobs. I'm suspicious of the claim that Atlanta is significantly different. From what I have seen, it's usually bad financial decisions.
And for context, saving about double that during and post COVID by obtaining a remote job where the employer does not discriminate by location too much other than for maybe career growth.
I posted calculations. $170K a year after taxes is $9900 a month before health insurance. To save $100K a year since only some of it would be pretax means you are living off of around $1600 a month.
And while I work remotely, remote jobs are getting more scarce and more competitive. Every job gets hundreds of applications within the curse few hours.