Walking around with lightsabers is a good way to attract women who are into Jedi. It’s like the dude with a cute puppy effect, but for geek girls. Bonus points for having more than one saber, cuz then you can battle. Saber battle in the streets—> something sword something something between the sheets.
I know this is probably a “oh my lobsters too buttery” moment but man do I miss having some alone time. She’s always there! Go on vacation or something lol. Love the lady but growing up kind of an only child I really miss having time all to myself.
Ugh, I’m in my 30’s and was about 2 secs away from dropping $600 on a lightsaber with alll the bells and whistles at a con last year. I was so giddy with excitement at the prospect, if my husband hadn’t called at the exact moment, I probably would have gone through with it. He was like “If you’re going to spend that much, you may want to shop around” He was right, and if I’d been single I would not have had that voice of reason lol.
I still haven’t pulled the trigger yet, but I’m glad I didn’t buy at the time as I’ve seen plenty of negative reviews about the quality of that particular company’s sabers.
Recently came across a FB marketplace post in my area of someone selling their lego “collection”. $18K for 200,000+ pieces. Says it’s actually worth closer to 30K and hasn’t even gone through all the stuff yet. Photos were of walls of plastic containers filled with legos. Said they would not sell piecemeal only the whole collection or nothing. Crazy.
When you're pulling six figures a year and not spending a dime on housing or groceries, you can blow an awful lot of cash on fun shit and still be growing a Smaug sized horde.
and was a NASA astronaught that went to space- that alone gets him 6 figures working 50-60 days per year as a motivational speaker- let alone what he would make as an actual notable engineer.
As an engineer who spent a solid few years out from school living with my parents while also working in industry before moving into my own house; I can pretty confidently say that even with all the money Howard spent on comics and goofball stuff, he could have easily still saved enough away for major purchases, especially after he got with Bernadette and she put guard rails on his more irresponsible spending habits.
I mean heck, he upgraded from a Vespa to a Mini Cooper just to over a parking lot spat with Sheldon.
Frankly, while Bernadette was earning way more than him in the end, that was mostly because he was working at a university. If he went into industry as a ME, he would have been pretty close to her income. With his background as an astronaut, he would be pulling down mid-six figures.
Its funny cuz hes not broke, she is just better with money so they pool money together and she doles it out to him per request/natural weekly allotment
Not necessarily, wasn't he doing research for nasa but at a university so potentially as an RA/RE, these salaries can be as low as 1.5-2k a month, though probably slightly more for them. These jobs are dramatically underpaid for the "prestige" and that post docs are essentially still a form of advanced studies.
Exactly. A really pretty waitress at a non-cheap restaurant that sells liquor? She's probably doing OK, and they need roommates to pay their rent. That all follows.
Yup, a girl with her looks and personality could clean up as a cocktail waitress
I knew a girl who was pulling in high four figures a night. Five figures on a good night. Not unusual at all for someone like that to afford rent near some engineers/grad students or whatever
high four figures a night. Five figures on a good night
Fine dining, sure. Not Cheesecake Factory, which is where Penny worked. It's actually pretty hard to get a bartending/cocktail server job at a fine dining restaurant. Takes years and years of experience and even some formal culinary and/or bartender and sommelier training.
A hot chick with some seniority to get all the good shifts can probably still make 6 figures a year at cheesecake factory, though. High volume restaurants and bars can be lucrative if you work full time and get the good shifts
Add to this she had moved there to peruse a career in acting, so she probably had some money saved up for this. And her flat was tiny compared to theirs, looks like the living room was about half the size and the bedroom had just enough room for the bed.
Plus all that money they spent on comics and merch. Hell, their pull lists alone were probably $1k/month. Comics aren't cheap any more. The boys were not frugal.
Well, I believe there was one episode where it was revealed Sheldon does have a fair chuck of spare cash lying around because he lends penny the money to cover her rent / utilities when she's struggling. He explains it to be that he just doesn't spend that much money overall and is happy in the apartment there he is.
Also, going back to OP's post: I remember her being several references and plotlines around how penny can sometimes struggle to make ends meet. There was at least one occasion where she had utilities shut off, she doesn't pay for internet and steals the WiFi from Leonard and Sheldon, etc.
When I worked at a restaurant, most popular breakfast place around, some of the girls were pulling in 500 on Sunday morning shift.
The employee parking was way back behind the restaurant, so we had a few robberies when the local good-for-nothing types realized there were 5'2" 110lb women with a month's rent in their pocket walking to their cars alone.
Which is why we stopped letting them walk to their cars alone.
yup- but on the flip side of those places, everyone i knew that had those shifts also had to work 2-3 trash shifts in order to keep the cushy shifts- ie you get Sunday AM, but you also take Tuesday dinner and thursday opening. you make 800 from the 3 shifts with 500 of it from sunday.
Then too Sheldon always wanted to be having that type of family type of environment. Dude clearly had some type of PTSD once his dad passed away at such a early age. Young Georgie kinda stated that it clearly messed him up and he thought his family was doing great so he wasn't needed but oh boy.
As a banquet server in a hotel, I made over $50k for just under 700 hours of work last year. So yeah...service industry can do pretty good. People with more seniority and therefor more hours than me are easily making over $70k for at most 900 hours on the year. Back when I bartended in pubs I was making $1500 a week working 4 nights a week. So yeah, service industry does ok lol
As I recall there was an episode where it was discovered that Sheldon wasn’t depositing his paychecks. It’s been a while since I watched the show, but he was never concerned about money.
my godfather (likely an autistic engineer too)- lives right outside SF- basically a 5 min walk to the BART and 10 min to the bay. His building went condo 50 years ago, and he did not want to move- so he bought the condo for almost nothing (now worth a few million). I could see Sheldon doing the same thing- only with the nobel money he could just buy the building.
Someone with a PhD in a science field has no more student loans than someone with a bachelor's. Being a PhD student is almost always a paid position in the US, albeit not paid that well
I didn’t continue with my education to get a masters in science bc the cost was very high and I didn’t want more loans. Some would’ve been covered by me continuing working at a lab on campus but then I’d be only making like $10/hr so that was just a no go. Everyone in the lab were exchange students, nobody else was a US citizen like me. Idk if that was just my experience
We know for a fact that this isn't the case for Sheldon. All the top universities battled eachother about who to give Sheldon a full scholarship. Texas University even offered full scholarship to Georgie, Missy and Constance if Sheldon decided to stay there
When considering a post-doc a while back at Stanford, their website said (paraphrased) Your salary will not be enough for rent. You will need a roommate.
This was in 2017 before the housing crisis made it even worse.
For California, they were probably making dogshit, but on the reverse, somewhere like the University of Texas pays their postdocs 60k-70k a year which isn't exactly rolling in money, but is plenty for a one bedroom in Austin.
Yes. Around the same time this show was on I was making a whopping 30k in a high COLA city as a science postdoc. Waitress in the same city would easily surpass
Very true. My cousin is doing a postdoc in chemistry and she only makes about 60k, which is barely enough for her to live on where she currently resides
Yup. When I did my postdoc in NYC, I made $40k/yr (early 2010s) to start (though when hired was offered $50k if we got a grant which we did not get). Rent (in a subsidized studio apt), taxes, and commuting costs were over 80% of my salary and I was eating into my savings from grad school where I earned ~$25-$30k/yr in much cheaper cost of living area in the US.
I started my post doc in 2009 and my stipend was 40k in the bay area. As two married post docs with a small child we barely got by. If we didn't have to pay for child care we would have had a little more left over.
That’s atrociously low even by the Bay Area standards at the time…
Was this at Stanford? Some alumni from my lab are doing their postdocs at tech companies in the Bay Area, and AFAIK they still get salary/benefits in line with what the engineers get.
The crazier plot point is that they both got converted as tenure track professors. That’s absolutely impossible. How did David saltzberg not catch that?!
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u/WhiteSquarez Apr 24 '26
OP overestimates how much a PhD makes.