Shocked: Our bare-bones monthly cost of living is 5K after taxes! What's yours?
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Anonymous
$150 for groceries for a month? Do you receive a subsidy or just eat ramen? |
Anonymous
How can you think it's a waste when you don't even know what PP and his/her spouse do for a living or how much they make? |
Anonymous
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I think we're talking about different things by bare bones.
One is what choices you make in an effort to be frugal or save money. In my situation, there are certain things I'm not willing to cut to be frugal. I pay for my middle schooler to play sports, because I think he's happier and healthier, and I feel safer to have him busy after school rather than home alone. I pay for summer camp for the same reason. Others buy organic food, or visit relatives in a distant place, or drive to work to save the extra hour public transportation would save them. All of these things are totally reasonable choices. In the same vein, if you're a partner in a law firm, then paying the $2,000 a month health insurance, rather than putting that money into savings makes total sense. The second is what you would be willing to cut to be able to stay home. I know for me, I could easiy cut the camp and sports if I was home full time. Would I be willing to? Maybe, not sure, if that was the only cut I needed to make. However, as a single mom I'd also need to cut out the great school district we're in, and food on the table, and heat and all sorts of things I consider much more important than having a SAHP for a middle schooler who is in school all day. In that sense, if you have great health insurance, would you cut that in order to be home? The third is what you can make do on in a crisis. We rent, so in a real financial crisis, we could move to a cheaper school district. I could do without a car (it would be a pain) my kid could do without the sports. If I was paying $2,000 for health insurance, and didn't have chronic medical needs, and my salary dropped to nothing -- I'd find a new plan or see if I could get my kid on state healthcare of something. |
Anonymous
It sounded to me like OP tracked all of her expenses and then came up with a monthly average of $5000 for all expenditures. So I did think she was asking for the complete budget. The term "bare-bones" is confusing, though. There are clearly many expenses we could cut if we had to. |
Anonymous
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This is what we spend. Some could be cut if we needed to, so not totally barebones.
$2100 mortgage (incl. escrow) $2500 nanny $550 preschool $2000 speech and occupation therapy for DC $800 food and restaurants $400 car payments $400 student loans $300 utilities, internet & phone $300 gas & downtown parking The financial costs of having a special needs child (mild special needs but we're doing the full intervention) have been large. We have good incomes now so while we can, we're maxing out retirement contributions and putting $1500/mo into a 529. Travel is something we spend a lot on and could cut if needed. We started out with almost $300K in student loans (both laywers) and have paid it down to about $100K (federal consolidated, interest rate under 3%), so our monthly cost is not huge. |
Anonymous
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I agree that there is a huge difference between bare bones budget and actual.
Our bare bones budget (if one of us lost a job): Mortage: $3400 Utilities: $180 Health Insurance: $150 Car Insurance: $100 Gorceries: $500 Misc. $400 =$4730 Our minimal budget is (what we are comfortable spending/saving): Mortage: $3400 Utilities: $180 Health Insurance: $150 Car Insurance: $100 Gorceries: $1000 Misc. $1000 Afterschool Care: $575 College Saving: $500 Misc. Saving: $1000 =$7905 Our actual budget is that plus $1500 more in savings = $9,400 plus retirement |
Anonymous
| Ours is about $5500, of which $2400 is rent, $1200 is daycare, and $400 is student loans. We spend around $125 on groceries per week for two adults and a toddler. |
Anonymous
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OP- unless these folks track every dollar like you did I think you need to take these estimates with a huge grain of salt... b/c as you know, until you start tracking your perceptions of what you spend are typically WAY OFF. We have been tracking every dollar in Quicken for years, so i have complete confidence in these monthly averages from 2010. At the time, we had 1 child under the age of 2 yrs:
Rent: 2020 Utilities and car insurance: 346 Child care: 1200 Groceries: 439 Other food (meals out, coffee out, snacks out, wine and beer, etc): 193 Household shopping (furniture, decorations, cat food, etc): 152 Other shopping (gifts, other stuff hard to classify): 371 Travel and auto repair: 330 Misc (professional dues, donations, vet bill, etc): 349 So, roughly 6800K / month, excluding savings |
Anonymous
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OP here. Thanks for all your thoughtful responses. I never imagined that my post would generate this much discussion.
I concede that "bare-bones" is probably not the best descriptor for our current budget. Still, there's not a whole lot of fat there. We've made concerted efforts over the past year to find ways to pare down our spending on things we don't need and that don't add appreciable enjoyment to our lives. In case anyone is interested, I went back to our records and added up every single non-essential purchase over the past several months: every single cup of coffee, every toy for DC, every charitable donation, every gift within and outside the family, and so on. And, believe me, we kept track of every single penny of this! Eliminating these costs would reduce our monthly spending by $422. You could argue that on a bare-bones budget we should also give up our basic cable package, or that we should use a land line instead of cell, so let's call it $500. (By the way, don't be all shocked and tell me that your family spends less than this on non-essentials unless you've actually tracked your spending, as DH and I have.) That's still leaves $4500/month in expenses for what could be more accurately described as a bare-bones budget. That's still a lot of money, folks, especially given our low transportation and mortgage costs. Anyway, thanks again for your responses. |
Anonymous
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You quoted me.
Last year, our only medical expense aside health insurance was $15 co-pay fir my first OB visit and $250 for my emergency C-section. This is our first real Christmas with a child so I'm not sure if we'll buy gifts or not. For my taste DC has enough. We don't have family in the coutry and don't exchange gifts with friends. Clear now? I go to the grocery store once a week and spend on average $40. Just came back, BTW and spent $39 this trip. I'm not an extreme couponer but I do stock up when I see a good sale and clip coupons for things that we actually buy. I cook from scratch and our diet is different from most people we know (DH is vegetarian, DC is gluten/lactose intolerant and I'm gluten intolerant with food allergies). We eat a lot of fresh produce and rarely use substitutes. We don't buy clothes every month and don't service our car every month so I just listed what we spend every month. Gas is around $100...
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Anonymous
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Bare-bones:
$2000-Rent 700-Groceries (family of 6) 408-Car payment 350-Electric 350-Gas (1-car family, so we do a LOT of driving) 165-Car Insurance 142-Dental payment plan (for DD's braces) 162-Cellphones (4) $4277 Actual $2000-Rent 700-Groceries (family of 6) 408-Car payment 400-Childcare (we pay my Mom, but this will increase to $1000 once daughter starts daycare in Dec/Jan  )
350-Electric 350-Gas (1-car family, so we do a LOT of driving) 290-Afterschool care for DS 200- Cable and phone 165-Car Insurance 142-Dental payment plan (for DD's braces) 162-Cellphones (4) $5167 |
Anonymous
Yes, we're clear. You did not factor in all of your monthly expenses. Got it. |
Anonymous
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$1400 a month for housing and utils
$1200 a month for groceries, clothes, gas and metro, house stuff ($300 a week) Another $1000 or so for other costs (dr. copays, birthday presents, nights out, etc) $3600. |
Anonymous
| PP: $1000 includes health insurance and cell phone bills as well. |
Anonymous
Actually, that is just one partner with a Masters' degree and one with a Ph.D. We are the same. A Masters' degree is basically the minimum for most professional fields now and a Ph.D. is required for certain kinds of work (and not always the high paying kind, but often the life-saving, cancer-curing, clean water developing, or higher educating kind.) |