Reply to Shocked: Our bare-bones monthly cost of living is 5K after taxes! What's yours?

Forum Index » Money and Finances

Reply to "Shocked: Our bare-bones monthly cost of living is 5K after taxes! What's yours? "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]OP here. Thanks for all your thoughtful responses. I never imagined that my post would generate this much discussion.

I concede that "bare-bones" is probably not the best descriptor for our current budget. Still, there's not a whole lot of fat there. We've made concerted efforts over the past year to find ways to pare down our spending on things we don't need and that don't add appreciable enjoyment to our lives.

In case anyone is interested, I went back to our records and added up every single non-essential purchase over the past several months: every single cup of coffee, every toy for DC, every charitable donation, every gift within and outside the family, and so on. And, believe me, we kept track of every single penny of this! Eliminating these costs would reduce our monthly spending by $422. You could argue that on a bare-bones budget we should also give up our basic cable package, or that we should use a land line instead of cell, so let's call it $500. (By the way, don't be all shocked and tell me that your family spends less than this on non-essentials unless you've actually tracked your spending, as DH and I have.)

That's still leaves $4500/month in expenses for what could be more accurately described as a bare-bones budget. That's still a lot of money, folks, especially given our low transportation and mortgage costs.

Anyway, thanks again for your responses.[/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