Reply to Family of 5, appx $300K HHI - would you do anything different?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]On the spending more than you earn - in the original post you mentioned travel. How much have you spent on travel in the last 3, 6, 12 months? If your income generally more than covers your monthly expenses is travel what’s pushing you over?[/quote]

I was wondering how long it would take for anyone to ask me about that  :lol:

When I just started this YNAB thing (yesterday), I googled what is a good travel budget and google said 5-10% of your salary.  So I thought, I like travel - so I am picking the high end, and I input $20K to save for travel into my budget.  That had me saving a lot ($1,666 a month), so seeing how much we have in bills every month - I considered reducing it to $10K but then I felt I had practically already committed us to appx $15K of travel for the next year - so reduced it to that amount.

IDK if that is also a crazy amount but I basically plan travel one year out (and some of it I've already paid for).  If you book early, you can get good things for decent price.  If you book late, the only good things left are expensive.

Really, what I feel kept me going for so long is that other people buy clothes and do home improvements and I didn't and put that money to travel.  But then this year I traveled and spent on the aforementioned home improvements that I hadn't done in 10 years and that put me over the edge and realizing I need to consider a budget. 
My proposed YNAB budget also had me saving[b] $5K for home improvement per year[/b] which I may also need to reduce (?)

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The estimate is that most people will spend 1-2% of their home cost on routine maintenance/updates over the course of its lifespan.  Some years you won't spend hardly anything but in another you have to replace the roof, the heat pump and fix the plumbing. I found that estimate to be true for us in the long run.

Also, something you may need to adjust for YNAB is that if you're higher income you can't plan on receiving financial aid for college, so you need to budget for 3 college payments in your college savings.  
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