Originally Posted by BURflyer
The low pay is only the first year for most regionals. Enough for you and your 5 other FO roommates to survive. The pay gets better after the first year. Regional Captains make good money. I really doubt many Reg pilots do outside work with only around 10 days off. Especially the turbo prop guys who fly 90-100 hours a month.
This is correct. Your first year you may need to supplement, or at least have some money saved up. I don't really think it requires 5 roomates, if you and just one other FO get together and split a two bedroom apt., you should be fine. Second year I see no reason you cannot get out on your own. Most second year pay is $30K-$35K or so. This is enough to rent a pretty nice apt. and be on your own, unless you like a roomate to split the rent, etc. No reason to need to supplement on captain pay at all.
Crazy as it may sound, go by the formula Oprah gives for her "Debt Diet", lol. It really does work.
35% of monthly salary for housing (rent, mortgage)
25% of monthly salary for transportion (gas, train, etc.)
15% of monthly salary for yourself (food, fun, etc.)
10% of monthly salary you save.
Even on $30,000 per year FO salary, with taxes taken out, that gives you about $650+ for rent. You can find a nice one bedroom apt. on that. It gives you $460+ for transportation. $280+ for yourself, and allows you to save $180+ per month, which is over $2,000 for the year. Of course, you can adjust those as needed, by adding and subtracting from one or the other. For example, going 20% for transportaion, and 20% for yourself, and so on.
As your pay goes up, such as upgrade to captain, you can get a larger apt., buy a house, save more, etc. For example, lets say you are a 4th year FO at ExpressJet, and you upgrade to captain. Lets assume you fly 85hrs per month at $64 per hour, which is around $65,000 per year, plus or minus some.
That gives you
-$1,400+ for housing (you can buy a home on this)
-$1,000+ for transportation (even if it costs $50 per week to fill up your car with gas, that is $200 per month, leaving $800 for a car payment - thats a pretty nice car)
-$600+ for fun
-$400+ to save, which is nearly $5,000 saved for the year.
Again, you can adjust them to better fit your needs, such as if you don't have a car payment, or a low one, and don't need $1,000 per month toward transportion, you can add that to your housing, fun, or save more, etc.
Give it a try. If you don't try to live way above your means, you can live pretty comfortably. Remember, the average American salary today is $39,000 per year. And, even if you stayed at your captain pay mentioned above for the remainder of your career, although we know it will go up, lets assume you are 28 at that time, you can have, by age 60, $160,000+ saved, plus whatever you saved before.