S/O: what has surprised you about living with your income?
Iblamethebeer
member
I think we've now demonstrated that a whole lot of people on this board make more money than average but are surprised to find that their spending power is lower than they expected it to be. We also seem to have agreed that there are a lot of people facing much grimmer financial realities, so let's take that as a given.
Putting that aside, I'm curious to hear what has most surprised you about what it feels like to actually live with your current income, versus what your expectations were as a young adult.
For example, DH and I make way more than I thought we would but my clothing budget is a tiny fraction of what I assumed a "grown-up professional" clothing budget would be. When I was in high school/college I always thought I cared about clothes, but when it comes to allocating real dollars, it tends to fall by the wayside for me. I also find that what I thought would be a fairly typical Saturday night date for two parents in their thirties (babysitter + restaurant + bottle of wine + movie tickets) actually seems like a big rare splurge.
Anyone else?
Re: S/O: what has surprised you about living with your income?
Even when I was in college I thought that I'd be able to afford luxury cars/clothes and go on expensive vacations. Now, DH and I would rather max out retirement, save for kids college, put a sizable down payment on a home.
Of course, I now think that I'll be able to do all those fun things when we retire so maybe I'll have the same realization then. Ha!
I never thought we'd be debating on having a second LO due to finances. Went to college, made good financial decisions, make good salaries. Of course we would have two children, right?!?! Guess not.
I never thought I would be wishing we lived closer to our parents so that we could swing some sort of creative childcare solution.
MMC 3.30.16
We have a group of friends that are still bachelors. There are 3 of them live together, with pretty good jobs, and they have every toy imaginable - huge TV's, Harley's, boat etc. We came back from their house, you kinda look around at us not having those things, and I told my husband 'yay you got a wife and 401k instead'.
But perspective has a lot to do with it. DH grew up with a single mom living in a two bedroom apartment. Everything we have now is way more than he ever had. We are very thankful for what we have.
Ditto what others said about houses. When we moved in there were a couple of projects I would have likes to fix up (ex. 20 year old carpet throughout 90% of the house). It's so much easier and cheaper to let it be, I don't think we will ever do optional home improvement.
Also PTO. I would have assumed we would have no problem going on one family vacation every year, but almost every single day of my PTO gets used up taking off for major Jewish holidays. Even if we can afford to take a vacation, we can't afford for me to take unpaid days.
Now, with every pay increase comes an expense increase of some kind so it seems as though I never see that raise.
Beevol said it. Even as recently as 5 years ago, I thought that 6 figures meant a mcmansion and bmw and european vacations every year. F*ck, I'd settle for getting my nails done every couple weeks.
Sometimes I'm embarrassed at how little we actually have to show for ourselves. We'll be in our 40s before we can buy a house, if we even bother at that point. We have decent 401ks, but my husband still has student loans and we have bare-bones savings.
Some of this is because of our daughter's health issues. And we live in one of the best states for health insurance, in terms of what they're forced to cover! Yet every year we shell out thousands. I can't imagine what families do when they have kids with autism or similar diseases and need all kinds of therapy.
I had a similar upbringing - we were lower middle class until fifth grade, when my dad was laid off the second time. We were on wic and foodstamps but I remember taking plain buttered bread to school for lunch. To this day, I overspend on food, buying way more than we can eat, because I feel an insane amount of anxiety over having an empty fridge and cabinets. I can't relax until they're overflowing.
Food insecurity sucks.
I'm on the total other end of the spectrum and aware of how lucky we are.
DH and I have good jobs (civil engineer and clinical pharmacist). We probably take home just under $100,000 a year combined. We live in a very LCOL area, pay $1000 for daycare each month for 2 kids and don't have to pay much for transportation as workplace is 5 minutes away from home for both of us. We graduated without student loans (parents didn't pay for school but let us live at home rent-free, we went to the local University, and we worked our butts off at mcjobs to pay tuition). Our kids are going to a local public school and in Canada paying for pre-kindergarten or whatever is not the norm, I guess things are a lot less competitive here. Of course we have free health care. Our jobs both have government pensions and we have $50k in investments. Our only debt is on a $465,000 4000sf house that is very low maintenance, and I think we have paid at least a third of it off by now. We paid our wedding through funds raised at a "social" (the norm here). We have cheap hobbies (reading, running, computer games).
I'm surprised that DH and I get so excited about putting more money down on our house or in investments or savings, RRSPs or RESPs. We donate because we don't know what else to do with our money. It's a good problem.
You all need to move to Canada
I don't get raises at work anymore since I went part time (thanks, rigid public sector pay structure) but even if I was still FT, my employer has given step increases twice in the last six years and cost-of-living increases once, while foisting more of the ever-increasing insurance premiums on the employee.
Meanwhile, the cost of child care, electric, gas, homeowner's insurance, meat, groceries, insurance deductibles, real estate taxes, etc have all gone up.
I think I'm just surprised by how expensive everything is generally. I mean DH and I make close to $200K combined and we cannot afford to put money into savings, and since we got married I think we have been on two vacations. I get my hair cut like twice a year, haven't had a mani/pedi since before DS was born, and the last girls' night out I had was when I was about 4 months pregnant (DD is now 4 months old). Our childcare is about 50% more than our mortgage, our student loans are about equal to our mortgage, and that's about it. We also live in a HCOL area (where I grew up, where law school was).
Ten years ago, if you had asked me what I would be doing with $200K pre-tax income, I would have told you, "Ordering my butler to bring me some more bon bons."
BFP #1 6/28/11 ~ EDD 3/7/12 ~ m/c 7/15/11 at 6w2d
BFP #2 8/29/11 ~ EDD 5/12/12. 4/25/12: Our take home baby is here!
BFP #3 8/27/13 ~ EDD 5/11/14. 4/27/14: Our second take home baby is here!
God Bless You my Little One
Farida, our first child, born on the 19th of July 2014
Farida, at 8 weeks
I guess I never had huge expectations, but am very happy where we ended up. DH and I both grew up in solid middle class families, with nice houses, great school systems, annual vacations, etc. We were both fortunate.
Now we make much more than our parents did and have a lifestyle I really always dreamed of. We are doing really well. We have nice pensions and retirement plans. We're able to save money for both ourselves and DD's education. We can travel, my absolute favorite thing. We both work hard and enjoy our careers.
Sometimes really, really want to spend more time with DD, but that is one good thing about having her later in life. I will be able to retire in 11 years and hopefully take her (and a potential 2nd child) high school year off.