How did Frasier pay for his apartment?

How could Frasier succeed in this project, let alone his mortgage, on the salary of a local radio personality? Sure, the ’90s were a time of economic boom – but not even that can make up for his out-of-control sherry and opera habit.

There was only one way to find out: an investigation of a single, demented woman into a fictional apartment on a TV show that went off air more than 15 years ago.

How much would an apartment like this cost?

First of all, I needed to know how much Frasier had paid for an apartment in a luxury skyscraper with a breathtaking view of the Space Needle. (He owns the place, as evidenced by his recurring drama on the condo board.)

A few years ago, Curbed ran an article trying to determine the value of Frasier’s apartment in 2018. Most of the real estate agents they spoke to put it in the $ 3 million range.

But I wanted to know how much he could have spent on it in 1993, so I contacted several Seattle-based real estate agents and surprisingly many of them didn’t email me when I asked them to rate. a fake 90 apartment. But Scott Wasner, the executive vice president of Christie’s International Real Estate Seattle and self-proclaimed “condominium expert” of downtown Seattle, did it. He gave me an estimate of $ 1 million for 1993 and $ 5 million for today. So $ 1 million was going to be my starting point.

How much did Frasier earn?

Before Frasier was a radio host in Seattle, he worked as a psychiatrist in Boston. By the time the show started, Frasier was 40 years old. So suppose he started working as a full-time psychiatrist at the age of 30 and in 1983. (After graduating from college, he should have completed his medical studies and then a residency, which lasted about four years. years each.) Then he started his gig as a radio announcer in 1993.

Because I couldn’t just FOIA “Frasier salary”, I tried to find the numbers I was looking for through the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I called them and a friendly employee helped me access their historical data. However, they only had public records on their website dating back to 1997. Biden’s America!

I knew I had to bring the big guns: our research librarian Deirdre McCabe Nolan. She stepped in and sent older statistics from the Career Outlook Handbook. Deirdre also informed me that the database she was pulling the information from was called FRASER. That’s when I started getting that crazy look in my eyes that Mark Ruffalo gets in movies where he digs into files and investigates something bad.

From the figures available, I learned that in 1989 the average salary for a psychiatrist was $ 117,700. Although Frasier probably would have done less starting and more at the end of his tenure, to simplify matters, let’s say he worked this job at this salary from 1983 to 1993. If he saved the recommended 20% of his income during that time, he would have $ 235,400 stashed away at the end of that 10-year period – of course, that’s before taxes.

As for his new gig, the average salary for a radio host in 1994 was only $ 27,901.

Could he pay for his seat?

Let’s say he paid $ 200,000 up front. The mortgage would have been untenable on his new salary. Plus, he would likely have paid Lilith child support, part of Daphne’s home health care worker fees, daily cappuccinos at Café Nervosa, impulsive trips to Bora Bora which he inevitably ruined, etc. . Then there was that period where he was fired for most of season six. So no.