$200K. What is your lifestyle like?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:1900 sqft home. $530k mortgage. Drive a paid off Mazda that's 7 years old. No name brand clothing.

Poor you

[Anonymous]

Dam you fools poor

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If your HHI gross income is $200-250K, what does your lifestyle look like?

Two incomes or one SAH or part time?
Kids or DINC?
SFH, townhome, or condo? Cars? Vacations?
What do you feel like you can afford and what feels out of reach for you.

This is specific to the DMV. $200K is rich in West Virginia or Ohio or Iowa, and poor in Manhattan or San Francisco, so DC metro only please.

We are rolling in it, OP. Six Teslas, four homes that we never get to visit (but renovate often), private schools, 6 international vacations a year, and more. Isn't that the goal here? Driving a Tesla?

What do you want to know?

You better step it up!

[Anonymous]

It's rough with inflation these days. Living paycheck to paycheck due to housing costs these days.

[Anonymous]

Two incomes
One kid (teenager)
SFH, nice neighborhood but dated home

I feel that our lifestyle is pretty good. We do two vacations a year, but one of them is mostly on miles/points (DH travels frequently for work). However, we don't have a mortgage - we purchased our house in 2011 and made a big down payment with money my DH inherited from his grandmother, then paid the mortgage at an accelerated rate.

DS is in public school. I wanted to send him to Catholic school, but neither he nor DH were on board.

[Anonymous]

Two incomes
One kid (teenager)
SFH, nice neighborhood but dated home

I feel that our lifestyle is pretty good. We do two vacations a year, but one of them is mostly on miles/points (DH travels frequently for work). However, we don't have a mortgage - we purchased our house in 2011 and made a big down payment with money my DH inherited from his grandmother, then paid the mortgage at an accelerated rate.

DS is in public school. I wanted to send him to Catholic school, but neither he nor DH were on board.

To add vehicles, we have two, but mine is really old (2011). I don't have parking available at work, so I don't drive it often enough to warrant a newer one. Mileage is super low.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If your HHI gross income is $200-250K, what does your lifestyle look like?

Two incomes or one SAH or part time?
Kids or DINC?
SFH, townhome, or condo? Cars? Vacations?
What do you feel like you can afford and what feels out of reach for you.

This is specific to the DMV. $200K is rich in West Virginia or Ohio or Iowa, and poor in Manhattan or San Francisco, so DC metro only please.

OP, how old are you? How old are you rkids? You need to save for COLLEGE and RETIREMENT. Are you counting on some sort of windfall?

[Anonymous]

We live in San Diego. I (43) work part-time at $225/hr as an attorney and bill about 1000 hours a year. My wife (37) stays at home with our kids (4 and 2). We own a 4 bedroom house that we bought in 2019 for $900k and is worth $1.6-1.7m now. We spend $165k a year, which normally would be tight @ $200k income. But we saved a lot when I was in Biglaw so we're pretty much just coasting and cash flowing our expenses and letting our nest egg grow.

[Anonymous]

$440K combined + ~$150K ish in bonuses.
SFH, 1 million in mortgage at a very low pre-covid rate
2 kids in elementary public.
Two-three vacations a year (8k each).
No credit card debt
No car payments
No college savings/No 529/No investment properties
Eat out (due to busy schedules really) + home

We are both in our mid-30s but with a very large mortgage left to be paid + college x2+ new car payments ahead of us..

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:$440K combined + ~$150K ish in bonuses.
SFH, 1 million in mortgage at a very low pre-covid rate
2 kids in elementary public.
Two-three vacations a year (8k each).
No credit card debt
No car payments
No college savings/No 529/No investment properties
Eat out (due to busy schedules really) + home

We are both in our mid-30s but with a very large mortgage left to be paid + college x2+ new car payments ahead of us..

Did you read the subject line??

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:$225k here in DC.

Two incomes, two kids with a third on the way.
We're in Columbia Heights in a 2000 sq ft 3 bdrm/3 full bath row house that we bought when rates were low in 2020. It's our forever home and we love it. PITI is $4k a month all in.
We do not have a car, which we're quite happy about.
We've splurged on childcare. Our younger child is in a nanny share so that costs a lot. There was a time when both our kids were too young for school and for about a year and a half we paid full freight for our own nanny, about $5k a month. We'll never have to do that again, thank god (middle kid starts school next year). That was a tight time!

We currently only travel to see people we love, and we stay with them (grandparents, siblings, the occasional close friend). We do two weeks at the beach each summer, one with each side of the family. We handle transportation (rent a car) and expenses, but the grandparents on each side rent the house for everyone to stay in, which we are very grateful for. We have no interest in real travel right now with the kids so little anyway.

We have decent retirement funds (though not contributing a ton at this moment, maybe 6% of our income), a solid emergency fund, and no debt besides our mortgage. We also give about 3% of our take home pay to charitable causes right now. We hope to get both our retirement contributions and our charitable donations up to 10% each once we're done with the nanny years, and the rest of the money will go to college savings (basically non-existent at this point, a few gifts in their only, but our oldest is still in PK.)

Besides the year of our own nanny (that was tight!), we feel very comfortable. Basically - we can have anything we want, we just can't have everything we want. So, we splurge on housing, living in the city, number of children, and childcare, and we go cheap on the other stuff - we don't eat out, we don't have a car, we don't travel, we get all the kids clothes from thrift stores, etc.

We could easily commute out and live in a bigger house and travel. Or we could have one or two kids and eat out and buy lots of nice stuff. Or we could use daycare instead of a nanny and own a car. With $225k, you have choices, you just have to see them that way. Perspective is huge at this income. If you want to feel comfortable, you can. If you want to feel like you never have any money, you can.

Why are you making charitable contributions before saving for college? Will the grandparents pay? Not snarking, just curious.

PP here. The median household income in the US is $75k, and the worldwide median household income is $12k. At $225k, we have dramatically more than most, and it's important to us to give back. Honestly, I hate that it's only 3%, but it's where we are right now. Until we had to start paying for childcare, I had always given 10% of my money to charity. Bottom line, I guess it's important to me.

The funny thing is that none of the other people care about you and wouldn't lift a finger to help you. But it is important for you to buy away your self-imposed guilt.

DP. Go away with your cynical assumptions based on nothing.

Agreed, a ridiculous thing to say. I thought I had seen it all here, but apparently "giving to charity" is horrible to someone.

+1.
DP - Your unkind words reflect poorly on you, not the previous poster.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Two incomes
One kid (teenager)
SFH, nice neighborhood but dated home

I feel that our lifestyle is pretty good. We do two vacations a year, but one of them is mostly on miles/points (DH travels frequently for work). However, we don't have a mortgage - we purchased our house in 2011 and made a big down payment with money my DH inherited from his grandmother, then paid the mortgage at an accelerated rate.

DS is in public school. I wanted to send him to Catholic school, but neither he nor DH were on board.

Your husband failed Finance 101: never commingle an inheritance.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Two incomes
One kid (teenager)
SFH, nice neighborhood but dated home

I feel that our lifestyle is pretty good. We do two vacations a year, but one of them is mostly on miles/points (DH travels frequently for work). However, we don't have a mortgage - we purchased our house in 2011 and made a big down payment with money my DH inherited from his grandmother, then paid the mortgage at an accelerated rate.

DS is in public school. I wanted to send him to Catholic school, but neither he nor DH were on board.

Your husband failed Finance 101: never commingle an inheritance.

I suspect you aren’t very good at commingling in general

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It's rough with inflation these days. Living paycheck to paycheck due to housing costs these days.

DP here. I was going to say that it depends so much on housing! We could live okay on $200k because we bought our house back in 2013 and we don’t have daycare expenses. It wouldn’t be luxurious but very comfortable. It would be hard to be a young couple trying to buy a house AND pay for daycare on this income.

[Anonymous]

We are above $250K now, but were around $200-250k for most of our children’s childhood. We live in close in NOVA.

Where our money went really depends on the stage of life; as our kids got older we shifted fund from day care/after care/camps to college savings (but we always saved for college)

Mortgage was around $3500-3800 during this timeframe. 3K SF SFH (second SFH during our marriage) worth $1.2-1.3M
Mostly public schools, son went to 4 years private that was partially funded by my parents.
College savings went from $200 to $1200 per month as child care costs decreased.
Retirement savings went from 10% to maxing as child care costs decreased. We also maxed IRA some years.
We did not have lawn care or house cleaning services.
We paid cash for used cars and kept them for a long time.
We did beach vacations, cruises and smaller road trip vacations.

Kids are in college (fully funded, some excess funds for grad school) and salary is $330K (two big jumps in the last two years). We max all retirement accounts and save an additional $50K per year. H and I are planning two international trips per year and kids have done yearly trips to Europe for the last two years. So it’s a big lifestyle difference with the extra $80K and kids in (paid for) college.