Reply to Spinoff: How do you live below your means?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]We have a $350K HHI. Which according to DCUM is chicken shit!  We actually are not at all frugal with things we like to spend on - eating out, cleaning service, lawn service, foreign travel at least once a year (10-15K), buying books, enrichment for our kids.

Here is how we live below our means. 
1) Beautiful SFH with lovely yard, in a low COL area. Paid &lt;300K for it.  It is substantially less house than we can afford.  And we pay ridiculously low interest rates for it. 
2) Public schools.  (Low housing cost meant not that great schools. Kids have always been in magnet. They are outliers with no cohort in their home school.) 
3) No student debt.  Parents paid for us, just like we will pay for our kids
4) No childcare cost.  We managed to juggle flexible work-schedules to raise our two kids and our family helped. 
5) Max our retirement, max out college saving and then save more.  We live on 33% of our HHI. 
6)Compound interest. When both of us were working, we invested 100% of one salary and forgot about it. We lived and saved on one salary.  
7) Shop the best prices  and best quality goods at Amazon, Costco etc.  However, not into overpriced designer stuff.  We dress very well, but we do not buy overpriced stuff. 
8) Buy cars new (usually Toyotas) and use it till the end of its natural life. We do not lease. 
9) No credit card debt, unless it if for zero percent interest and we can pay it off without penalty.  All credit cards get paid off every month in full.

We live well, eat organic food, eat frequently in restaurants, have cleaning service, one SAH parent now, pay for 1 foreign vacation (1 week at least) for 4 of us, have Amazon Prime, entertain a lot, fully funded retirement and college, amazing medical insurance, good life insurance.

[b] All of this is possible because we do not have the top 4 money drains in this area - high mortgage, private schools, student debt, childcare.[/b]

[/quote]

What does the one spouse do that makes $350k?
What a city do you live in?[/quote]

Seriously.  350k single income. Yeah that makes things way easier. Plus family help with childcare, that is worth $100k easy.  We had 3 kids, 5 years daycare, 1500/month. $270k right there. [/quote]

350K income came after 28 years of working in a lucrative field.  We started with 40K. It would have been amazing to make 350K when we started.   DH is in tech. Live in what DCUM calls Bumf**kistan.  Parents gave us a huge financial leg up by covering the cost of our college.

One big piece of luck was having flexible work schedules that allowed us to not outsource childcare. + Parents provided backup when we were travelling or kids were ill.  Childcare was not outsourced because of emotional concerns rather than financial ones.  I think most people cannot escape this cost.

Housing and public schools were deliberate financial decisions that we took. We completely own these two choices.  Of course, we had to take several other steps to mitigate the impact of bad schools, but these also paid off in the long run.

Our aim was to keep our fixed costs as low as we could.  Everything else was discretionary costs. We always lived a low-key and decent life-style. So this is not a hardship for us. [/quote]

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