I don't really see any point in calling Silicon Valley the most viable place to save money at.

The problem is that it is close to an objective fact.

What you are doing is cherry picking things to fit your side of the story and picking worst case scenarios for Silicon valley. Car payments and gas DOES NOT CHANGE in Silicon Valley. You can buy a used car and pay almost nothing for it there as well so there is no point in bringing that into the argument. Your numbers for google are WAY off. You took the minimum salary for Google from god knows when as somehow a fair estimate of salary. Google's starting salary for fresh graduates is $160,000 a year. That is with no competing offers and no negotiation. It doesn't matter what glassdoor says about outdated salaries, I literally just went through this process. Even if I take your local company "average" which I am sure is not representative of new employees, and then assume I spend literally 5,000 a month on expenses (which is ludicrous and in no way necessary), my after expenses income is still higher than your "average" salary. You can't talk about how you could live off of 6,000 dollars a year living the world's shittiest lifestyle (which still would net you less savings) and not admit that you could do similar things and live off of 2,000 a month in Silicon Valley with roommates, free food, and a used car. The difference between our estimates is that mine was a worst case estimate that still showed you making a profit in SV while yours was an unfair scenario just to add a few extra thousand at the end of the year. In that case of 2000 a month, you would be taking home 136,000 a year (before taxes) and saving far more money. But the more likely scenario is that expenses are somewhere around 4,000 a month and you still take home far more than someone making even 80K in an area with 2,500 a month in expenses.

Something else of note is that I bought a 3 bedroom house in a good neighborhood after working for less than a year.

Sure if that is your goal, San Francisco is definitely not the area to be in. Buying real estate there is a fool's errand. But if you just want to save money and pay off loans after graduating college there is no other place (save perhaps Seattle and NYC).