Making it on $250,000 a year (WaPo business section, front page, Sunday)

[Anonymous]

Wow, I got a job with a top tier law firm after going to a public law school. Low $ student loans, but high salary. Of course, it was 1992. Looks like I lucked out.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Wow, I got a job with a top tier law firm after going to a public law school. Low $ student loans, but high salary. Of course, it was 1992. Looks like I lucked out.

I do think it was a really different market back then. I'm the PP with the recruiting story a few pages back, and the real irony of our committee's decision was the participation of all of the non-Ivy partners in making that decision to non-offer a public law school star. Our firm is full of fantastic & successful partners from non-top-tier schools who see no irony at all in wanting incoming classes of associates comprises solely of top-ten law school grads. As a PP pointed out, a version of your story still happens to people, but I do think it's a minority story now and not something to be counted on by most law school grads in this market.

[Anonymous]

*crickets chirping*

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

And what makes me feel frustrated at this income level is that the house is not in the best neighborhood for schools (bought during the bubble). But I felt that we absolutely had to be in a house before we had a baby.

ditto. especially the first part. I don't need a McMansion (I don't even really like those houses), but i find it impossible to feel "flush/loaded/living high" so long as we're in an older and tiny (TH) home in a place with not very good schools.

agreed. completely.

[Anonymous]

Wow, reading through this has really depressed me. We have a combined income of about $150K, which seemed like an inordinate amount of money when we both got our jobs out of grad school. But living here (we're from Seattle), even though I run a tight budget, I can't believe how much we have to spend just on basic living expenses. We just moved from Adams Morgan to NE WA - into a not very desirable neighborhood - because we found "cheap" rent of $2500/month for a two-bedroom rowhouse. We are trying to conceive, and I always wondered if we would be able to afford having a child. After reading this, I'm not sure we can. People have advised us to buy a house, but we just don't have a spare $100k lying around for that. Pretty depressing that, with three advanced degrees between us, my husband and I should reconsider having children because of the cost.

[Anonymous]

15:27, plenty of people (including us) have kids with HHI of 150K and under. We are doing just fine. We don't even feel like we're stretching our budget, can save for college, retirement, go on one longer vacation a year and several weekend trips, and can afford a meal out or a theater ticket without having to sweat it. I don't even know what we're going to do with all the extra cash once the kids are in school and we no longer have daycare payments! OK, I can think of a few things, but you get the idea...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Wow, reading through this has really depressed me. We have a combined income of about $150K, which seemed like an inordinate amount of money when we both got our jobs out of grad school. But living here (we're from Seattle), even though I run a tight budget, I can't believe how much we have to spend just on basic living expenses. We just moved from Adams Morgan to NE WA - into a not very desirable neighborhood - because we found "cheap" rent of $2500/month for a two-bedroom rowhouse. We are trying to conceive, and I always wondered if we would be able to afford having a child. After reading this, I'm not sure we can. People have advised us to buy a house, but we just don't have a spare $100k lying around for that. Pretty depressing that, with three advanced degrees between us, my husband and I should reconsider having children because of the cost.

Good Lord - 150K before kids? You will be fine. If you want to stay home and cut income in half or something that could be a challenge but plenty of people do it on less than 150K. Our HHI is also 150K and we have one child so far and are doing fine...if I really want to put it in perspective I would say we are doing great actually. Our mortgage is a bit lower at $2100 and daycare costs went down when our child turned two, but we are planning another and have budgeted out and we will still be doing okay if we have another in daycare.

[Anonymous]

I bet the PP doesn't live in DC.

[Anonymous]

I can understand how $250k sounds like a ton of money to someone who grew up poor, but consider those of us who have significant student loans and hefty childcare costs before judging us. We didn't all buy $1.5 million houses, some of us are living as frugally as our schedules allow and still find that $250k is plenty to get by, but not "rich."

I did not grow up poor, and $250k sounds like a ton of money to me. Our HHI is close to 400k, but we could live on 250k with no problem. I paid for my fancy private law degree (that did indeed open many doors) with loans, and I still think 250k is a lot of money!

[Anonymous]

The only difference I see with making 250k here (if you're responsible) and making much less is security. We don't live high on the hog at all, but we are able to save for retirement, college, have a very healthy emergency fund. If we had a catastrophe, we could deal with it, but the piece of mind is all we get, not throwing money around left and right.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Wow, reading through this has really depressed me. We have a combined income of about $150K, which seemed like an inordinate amount of money when we both got our jobs out of grad school. But living here (we're from Seattle), even though I run a tight budget, I can't believe how much we have to spend just on basic living expenses. We just moved from Adams Morgan to NE WA - into a not very desirable neighborhood - because we found "cheap" rent of $2500/month for a two-bedroom rowhouse. We are trying to conceive, and I always wondered if we would be able to afford having a child. After reading this, I'm not sure we can. People have advised us to buy a house, but we just don't have a spare $100k lying around for that. Pretty depressing that, with three advanced degrees between us, my husband and I should reconsider having children because of the cost.

We moved here from Seattle, too. We didn't realize how much having to pay a state income tax would effect us. Funny how we could live $50,000/year there and $150,000 here doesn't seem like a step up.

[Anonymous]

my mtg payment is $4,800/month (including taxes and insurance). what should our HHI be?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The only difference I see with making 250k here (if you're responsible) and making much less is security. We don't live high on the hog at all, but we are able to save for retirement, college, have a very healthy emergency fund. If we had a catastrophe, we could deal with it, but the piece of mind is all we get, not throwing money around left and right.

PP here - ugh, so many grammatical mistakes here! But I'll just correct the 'peace of mind' rather than 'piece of mind'. It's been a long day!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I bet the PP doesn't live in DC.

If you are talking about me, $150K poster with one child doing fine, I live in the DC area- about 2 miles from DC in what is considered a "close in" neighborhood. I really don't want to get into this because it won't end well, but do you think it is not possible to earn 150K here and do okay? Wow.

You sound completely clueless to how the vast majority of the world lives.

Let me guess....you are scraping by on 350K. I don't know how you do it, you poor dear. You really would advise a young couple making 150K not to have children?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
I can understand how $250k sounds like a ton of money to someone who grew up poor, but consider those of us who have significant student loans and hefty childcare costs before judging us. We didn't all buy $1.5 million houses, some of us are living as frugally as our schedules allow and still find that $250k is plenty to get by, but not "rich."

I did not grow up poor, and $250k sounds like a ton of money to me. Our HHI is close to 400k, but we could live on 250k with no problem. I paid for my fancy private law degree (that did indeed open many doors) with loans, and I still think 250k is a lot of money!

I actually grew up in a pretty wealthy family (my dad's career thrived and he retired as the CEO of a large national company) and I think 250K even in this area sounds like a lot of money. I wouldn't buy gold plated toilets, but it's certainly enough to have plenty of $.