*significant |
. The house you can afford is your current house. |
My BIL is in the medical field in a high need specialty. He was earning $300k in rural PA when my DH and I married 25 years ago. It went further then. They had 5 children. They did not have a big fancy house. They had five children instead. They chose to have the 5 children and kept their living expenses low enough for them to be able to send all five to nice colleges. They also put their retirement as a priority- not the big fancy house.
You need to stop thinking about the bigger house and start counting your blessings and shore up your finances. Want what you have. |
Thank you for this |
Because you can’t afford to move. In fact, it doesn’t seem like you can afford your current lifestyle. |
According to a rule of thumb, you should have $600k in retirement. I would not move if I were you |
I get why you want to move. But you have very little in savings (you need 3-6 months of expenses for an emergency fund in case of job loss or medical emergencies). Aside from barely having any retirement savings, you will also have four kids. You make too much to quality for the Excelsior scholarship, so you will be on the hook for tuition at SUNY (I'm assuming you would pay for in state tuition because you don't seem like you're saving for private).I 2200 is not small. You can pads down your stuff and everyone doubles up for a few years while you save more for your EF and separately for a down payment. I'm sure there are other ways to get more diversity in your kid's lives. Maybe via extracurriculars? |
Uh, no you haven't. If that's been the case, you'd have substantially more savings, or have substantially more equity in your house. Put another way - with what are you going to pay them down more fully? |
This is arrant nonsense, and an indication that you do not want serious advice. Children are a blessing - and also a hugely expensive aspect of life as an adult. It was the first kid, at 28 and 29, with substantially more than 6 figures of student loan debt and apparently significantly lower incomes, that was the most dicey financial move. Given the ages, of your kids, you had three, and a mortgage, when your income was much lower, before you cleared that student loan debt. That's insane, and an indication that you care more about the kids than a stable financial footing. That's fine, I guess (though not the way I would approach it), but it drives all of your future finances. You need to recognize that, or you're going to end up in truly dire straits. But, to answer your question, you can't afford to move. You've already more or less decided that your kids, if they go to college, will be saddled with the same debt you are (or at least, you won't be paying for their college). Work on that, and your retirement. |