Private school -- what portion of income are people spending?
![[Post New]](/jforum/templates/default/images/icon_minipost_new.gif){kind=icon}
Anonymous
| Sending my public school kid to boarding school next year. 529 plan is fully funded for college. Boarding school will cost 10% of our HHI for the next 5 years (8-12 grade). Boarding school needed for his sport as we’ve reached the limits of training he can get here. We’re older and our HHNW is about $6m. |
Anonymous
|
OP here again. Thanks for all of the financial advice. Even if unsolicited, it’s interesting. Last year was our first full year making our current income and we saved about $150k - before that income was almost half and a few years before that closer to $250-300k because my spouse worked on starting a business for 2 years and made zero during that time. So everything we saved was for retirement and a house. It looks like many people in our current income bracket have been making more money for longer than us, and have significantly higher savings. This explains why so many of our peers don’t seem hesitant about private school tuition. Point is well taken that spending the next few years saving instead of paying tuition would be wise.
To the question about biglaw partnership, yes one of us is a senior associate in biglaw up for partner in 1-2 years. Prospects appear to be very good according to partners in practice and firm managing partner, but of course there are no guarantees. Income would increase materially if that happened, but practice isn’t the most profitable at the firm, so it still wouldn’t be sky high (and never will be). |
Anonymous
|
You can afford it - you just have to decide and the non-financial factors will indicate how important it is and then you can prioritize.
But, as parent of kid who also did some public school, don't rule out that for a few years which is good for many reasons and also saves money during the younger years when you can build more wealth. |
Anonymous
| Each child is less than 5% on income for tuiton. So not a lot. |
Anonymous
This is absolutely true. I needed after-school help for many years after K because music lessons, sports practices, etc. all started well before either my husband or I could get home (and I only work part time). So you will actually need after-school help and good cleaning people. Gets easier once they are in high school. As an aside to all of this, and definitely unsolicited, think about what big law life means. Someone mentioned golden handcuffs - this is definitely an issue. People put themselves in the position to not be able to get out even if they are miserable. Clearly this is not the case for everyone and many people are very happy in big law. We opted out of it pretty early (I was never interested - I am a public interest attorney) because we saw its impact on many other family members and friends. Instead, my husband opted for a more niche practice area with more moderate sized firms (~300 attorneys?) that has done very well and given us a ton of flexibility. He's had time to coach sports teams when the kids were younger, able to watch almost all of their games in middle and high school (our youngest is now in high school), attend all school events and we've been able to travel often without him having to work throughout the vacation. Yes, we made some financial trade-offs but we are very comfortable. As to schooling, we figured it was easier to go from public to private rather than private to public (although some do this too). One stayed in public and the other switched to private. We just did what was best for each kid. That's just my two cents - feel free to ignore it! Lastly, ignore the poster(s) calling your savings pathetic. I would hate for someone to judge my financial decisions in my 30's. With nine years of post-secondary schooling (and a . year off between grad and law school) I was pretty close to 30 when I finally finished. My finances were not something I would have wanted to be examined publicly at that point! But we worked hard and are happy with where we've landed. |
Anonymous
| About 3% per kid off gross. |
Anonymous
| 1.1m gross income and 132k tuition for three kids. We notice the checks but don’t really sweat the cost. This country definitely needs higher taxes on the wealthy! |
Anonymous
Op, people on this forum are all obsessed with savings. People who only have $5M net worth at age 40 wonder why they aren’t doing better. 
We have 4 kids in private school and tuition this year was $170K. HHI is low seven figures, so this is a significant chunk of our income. DH recently made partner, however, and his firm is sort-of lockstep, so we expect income to go up. We still save a lot of money, since lifestyle is fairly modest other than private school and a large house (we have 4 kids!). As DH’s income goes up, we put all the money into savings. If you are both in big law and do private school you will continue to need a nanny - there are a lot of days off and vacation in private school and you can’t cobble together childcare with aftercare alone unless you have family who can help out regularly. For us, private school is more than worth it. We started our oldest two in public and moved them both in early elementary- we are in the Whitman district. But the added value from private school is worth the money. Frankly, education is a huge value for us so why would we not spend money on it if we can (which still being responsible)? I will also add that while I don’t think the private school calendar and social culture is great for households with two working parents, there is much better communication from the admin and teachers so I feel much more knowledgeable about how my kids are doing. |
Anonymous
| Another big law family here - we got rid of our full time nanny when our youngest started K and hired her back about 1.5 years later when she was looking for a different job. You will not be able to survive with two working parents in private school without full time care. They have too many half days, days off, etc. Our spring break is something like 8 days off of school, and that is just spring break. |
Anonymous
| OP, you could also move from a nanny to an au pair when kids get older. That could bring some savings. |
Anonymous
|
[
what do you do? quote=Anonymous]
Yes, income essentially doubled in 2020 when we moved here for my spouse’s job. We moved from a much higher cost of living market, so despite aggressively saving what we could, housing, taxes and childcare costs all made it difficult. We ended up buying a more expensive house here than we were planning to because the market was going up so quickly (and we have an elderly parent who will likely live with us soon and so needed more space for that). Nevertheless, I’m 31 and my spouse is 36 and until these responses, I felt pretty good about our savings  .
To the other poster asking about student loans, these are law school loans and the conventional wisdom I’ve heard is it makes more sense to invest the money than pay these off since the interest rate is <3% and we’ve been able to invest for better returns. For the time being, tuition would come out of the $100k (after tax) in bonuses, which aren’t included in the monthly $25k, and are essentially guaranteed. Eventually if we phased out the nanny it would come from there. In the meantime we’d still be saving/investing roughly $60-80k/year. |
Anonymous
| 4 in big 3, less than 5% post tax. |
Anonymous
|
Anonymous
So you make around $3.2 million? Wow. |
Anonymous
Wait that is post-tax so you bring home $3.2 million!? Wow I feel poor. |