November 26, 2012

For my real life project I decided to major in marketing in a university in California, probably University of California Los Angeles or University of California Berkeley. After searching for the starting salary on Google, I found a website which does salary surveys every once in a while, and I found one from September of this year which said that the average starting salary in marketing is $53,400. (SOURCE)
I then Googled for an income tax calculator and I found one here. This calculator included the federal tax rate, the social security tax, and the medicare tax. So for the calculator I had to find the state tax rate, and since I decided that I was going to live in California, I had to Google the income tax for California which ended up being 9.3%. That ended up leaving me with and after-tax salary of $38,032.52. The image of what it looked like is below:

I then divided my after-tax salary by twelve to represent the months in a year and ended up getting a monthly salary of $3,169.38.
Afterwards, I searched the internet to see what were the best places to get marketing jobs and I found this website. I wanted to live in California because that's where I was born and that's where I lived for the first few years of my life, so it's pretty significant to me. The website said that the number one place to get a job was New York City, but then it said that the second and third best places were in San Jose (where I was born) and San Francisco. So I decided that I would live in San Jose.
After searching for quite a while, I found two apartments that seemed like nice places to live in with a room mate. I wanted a room mate because it seems like it would be a lot easier and because when I looked at studio apartments they would be the same or more in price than half of a normal two bedroom apartment. The first apartment I found was this one which would be $1,755 a month ($877.50 each) and included these things:

The second one I found was this one which would be $1,674 a month ($837 each) and included these things:

So, I thought that the second was would be best because it was cheaper and it seemed to have a lot more. So if I were to share this apartment with a room mate I would spend around 26% of my monthly salary which means that every month I would be left with $2,332.38.