How much money do you need monthly to maintain your life-style?

[Anonymous]

Wow. Without childcare or housing or student loans... maybe $1500-2000/month? That would include luxury grocery shopping and lots of eating out. More if we didn't have to work and traveled a lot.

[Anonymous]

I had free housing utilities for a while when I was single. I spent between thousand and 1500 a month without trying To be frugal

[Anonymous]

$3k.

[Anonymous]

I could live well off of $2k/mo, but would throw in an extra $1k/mo to cover property taxes and insurance etc.

[Anonymous]

Not sure everyone is counting the same things. Just a few of my monthly expenses:

$800 - health insurance premium (self insured)
$500- contribution to HSA plan (some double counting with the next one except we use this as a savings vehicle so don't use it to pay health expenses)
$600 - out of pocket health care due to high deductible plan, although again some of this is kid related
$800 - weekly house cleaning plus tax obligation on that
$200 - lawn care (March-November)
$800 - groceries/wine (although that does include food for kids, so maybe a little less)
$400 - eating out (one or two decent meals, a few quick take outs)
$1200 - average monthly cost for vacations and travel not counting kids portion (ski trips, weekend trips, travel to summer house)

So that's over $5000 without clothes, car insurance, gas, car repairs, utilities, cell phone, gifts, contributions to church and charity, savings, etc. I get that much of this is at the high end but health care alone is nearly $2k.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We need about $10k

Wow! Really? Could you give us an idea as to where you spend the money? Just curious because I was the one who posted $5K and then saw others posted a lot less.

We do a lot of travel which is the only reason that our monthly expenses are as high as they are.

We have 3 properties. So property taxes along are about $1000 a month.

I just realized that I need to amend my amount to $6000. I was counting investments into the equation.

[Anonymous]

I put everything except mortgage, property taxes, childcare, utilities, savings and insurance on my credit card. Averaged over the year, my Amex bill is $4.5K/month (some months are $2K and some are up to $8K (vacations)).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Our house is paid off and prior to having a kid we lived off of $4000-$5000/month depending on how much we ate out or took trips. We used to travel a lot. Miss those days.

This was us too, house paid off and budgeted bigger amount for discretionary stuff back then. Now with pre-school, college savings and other child related costs, we had cut way back. If we took out 2013 expenses and divide it by 12, we are in the $4K - $8K range... depending on what you include in the , "maintaining your life-style".

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Let us assume your house is fully paid up so you don't have any mortgage payments. Also, you have no childcare expenses or college/school expenses either. It is just you and your spouse...........

I am leaving out the housing and children related expenses because there is so much variation in those categories of expenses. Other types of expenses are less likely to vary very much.

How much money do you need monthly to maintain your current life-style?

We have no mortgage, but we do pay $10,000 a year in real estate taxes (plus another $1700 for homeowner's insurance). No more childcare costs, but saving up for college education ($600 a month total for two kids).

We live on $6,000 a month. We could live on $4,500 a month easily. We're in our late 40s.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We need about $10k

Wow! Really? Could you give us an idea as to where you spend the money? Just curious because I was the one who posted $5K and then saw others posted a lot less.

We do a lot of travel which is the only reason that our monthly expenses are as high as they are.

Different poster, we don't travel, but DH charges about $2500 on piddly stuff to his AmEx every month. Meals out, liquor, golf stuff.

[Anonymous]

This is helpful and offers some basis for comparison. Ours is shown bold next to yours

Anonymous wrote:Not sure everyone is counting the same things. Just a few of my monthly expenses:

$800 - health insurance premium (self insured) $285 thru federal program that we are eligible
$500- contribution to HSA plan (some double counting with the next one except we use this as a savings vehicle so don't use it to pay health expenses) we don't have this and am not counting any savings within our monthly expenses
$600 - out of pocket health care due to high deductible plan, although again some of this is kid related $75 - again because of our coverage
$800 - weekly house cleaning plus tax obligation on that $200 - house cleaned bi-weekly
$200 - lawn care (March-November) $140 monthly incl winter because the service clears the snow as well
$800 - groceries/wine (although that does include food for kids, so maybe a little less) $1500 is our average Amex bill that includes food, gas, car insurance, cable, cellphones, eating out, for the two of us
$400 - eating out (one or two decent meals, a few quick take outs) See item just above
$1200 - average monthly cost for vacations and travel not counting kids portion (ski trips, weekend trips, travel to summer house) $500 monthly which includes two international trips and one cruise annually

So that's over $5000 without clothes, car insurance, gas, car repairs, utilities, cell phone, gifts, contributions to church and charity, savings, etc. I get that much of this is at the high end but health care alone is nearly $2k.

All of the above works out to about $2700: include another $500 monthly for clothes, gifts, car repairs, miscellaneous and we are at $3200 monthly.

[Anonymous]

$15k for us. Mostly mortgage and private school.

[Anonymous]

I think it would be around 6.5k for us.
700 for healthcare insurance
1000 for taxes insurance property
600 cleaning
400 - language lessons for kids

The rest is general expenditure including allocation for travel and vacations.

[Anonymous]

I don't have a lifestyle!

[Anonymous]

3k.