Reply to Family budget if your income is around $180-200K

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[quote=Anonymous]Interesting topic.

- Take home approximately $8400 (estimated average per year) after funding retirement and pension fund for the spouse. One spouse gets paid biweekly and there are 2 additional paychecks of about $6200 per year. That are not tracked, and we plan on spending that money on modest vacations and/or paying for credit cards if we exceeded our budgets through the year. That's our fallback money.

It's broken down in 2 forms:

- $2600 in savings: This savings fund is being built to buy our second house (hopefully a single family).

- $5800 in expenses:
- $2170 in mortgage + taxes + insurance + HOA
- $1200 in 2 car payments (both are new and were bought with 0 down...this is where it is pinching us).
- $300 to service a HELOC.
- $600 on food related expenses (we try to keep these very low).
- $140 on all utilities (Estimated: I keep them low very aggressively).
- $250 on gas and tolls (unfortunately one spouse has to travel quite a bit for work).
- $200 on kids activities (only daughter - we spend freely to put her in Tae Kwando, Arts, dance, swimming classes)
- $100 on personal care
- $150 on clothing and household essentials (again, we keep this very low by buying less and only as needed)
- $100 on education materials
- $120 on car insurance (got a really nice deal from the 21st century)
- $110 on media ($40 on cell, $50 Internet, $20 on netflix. No cable and no fancy carrier...again, we save a boatload of money here).
- $350: Remaining free money to be used for various purposes - mainly anticipated for household and auto maintenance/repairs etc.

You can see already that we are running a very tight budget despite having a decent take home income. This year for example, we have overspent some $3K already and we cannot use the full $6.2K for vacations. We need to compensate our savings fund that money because that's essentially where it was borrowed from.

If we had another kid and/or a bigger house, our expenses would be really high. In fact we are not paying for childcare at all, and yet, the budget is stretched thin. If we have a second child, we might even go in the red. We are really waiting for the auto loans to fall off (1 and 2.5 years respectively) before having a second child.

Our savings are nonnegotiable - we really treat that as life or death. Unless we save $30K after-tax, there is no point in having a high income really. Our mortgage is also a 15 year mortgage (in 3rd year), which is what makes the mortgage payment a little high.[/quote]

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