Reply to How to budget when your income is all bonus?

Forum Index » Money and Finances

Reply to "How to budget when your income is all bonus?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP here - thanks for everyone's replies! I knew there would be people on DCUM with a similar experience and wisdom to offer.

Our HHI is about 1M with bonus but about 350K without bonus, so it indeed is a cash flow problem. As you can imagine, a reasonable lifestyle at 350K is very different than a reasonable lifestyle at 1M. We want to optimize our lifestyle without feeling like we're "starving" throughout the year until bonus month comes. Or worse, spending away and there is no bonus month.

The expectation is that the HHI will grow a bit more before plateauing. Maybe 50% more. I work as well but I contribute very little to the overall HHI.

Currently, we are DINKS can definitely live on the 350K. However, we are planning to have children in the near future and will need to buy a house in this market, which will drastically increase our fixed costs and likely put us over the 350K mark. While we could save more of the bonus now to offset any worries, we are concerned that we would be wasting our "prime" DINK years so we're trying to see if any other solution is viable.[/quote]

You should be living on $350k (meaning, saving 20% of that like it's your only income) and saving 100% of your bonus for the next 2-3 years to build up a nest egg and savings for a down payment to buy a house.  If you figure out a way to smooth your income to adjust to "a reasonable lifestyle at 1M" before you even have a house or kids, you'll feel poor forever for no reason because you'll be adding in expenses that will cut into what you thought was "reasonable" and it will pinch.  Live cheap, build a base, and then coast.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics