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

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[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]

This is us. Except we are a bit higher income. Not getting strapped down by these things (we did have childcare though for a few years) really allows for wealth to grow. [/quote]

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