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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]We make $280 HHI and can afford it. We save save save save save. We don't buy fancy clothes or shoes. We drive one very old car and one new but modest car. We don't go on big vacations--all we do is drive to visit family or maybe drive for a long weekend somewhere off-season. Our TV is 10 years old and is not a flat screen. We don't pay for extra cable channels we don't need. We still buy all our groceries at Whole Foods...but I only buy the 365 brands, chicken thighs instead of breasts, no fancy cheese, etc. It's seriously cheaper than if I bought similar, organic products at Giant (and even cheaper sometimes than if I bought name-brand non-organics at Giant). We also save $1K a month for our son's college fund, fully fund our 401ks, and save an additional $1 - 2k a month for retirement on top of that. Bonuses go directly into savings--we don't think of it as money that we use to "treat ourselves." We're still paying $1200/month in law school debt too! We do our own yardwork, clean our own home, and do most home repairs ourselves.

I hear people who make much less than us talk all the time talking about their new BMWs, their fancy stereo/tv systems, their 2 week all-inclusive vacations, and their new Cartier watches and, in the same breath, talk about how poor they are. Give me a f-ing break. I'm now a SAHM, but we saved almost all of this money when I was working and we were paying a ridiculous of money for our on-the-books nanny--took at least 80% of my take-home pay. I have a Cartier watch that I bought for myself when I was working my a$$ off and we used to go on crazy amazing vacations when we were newly married, big law firm associates, but once we decided we wanted to buy a home that we could raise a family in, we cut out all of the extra spending and made the home our #1 priority. I also left my big law job several years ago and was making a much smaller salary, so the bulk of our savings came from DH's job.

You CAN buy a million dollar home if you don't think of yourself as the kind of people who can afford a million dollar home. We live modestly, but after 7 years of working, we have over $600k in assets. We also lost money on the last place we sold, so we don't have that equity to rely on when we buy our next place. I have family money, but we don't touch it. We also don't live like we're poor, but we don't spend our money unwisely or use it to buy tons of "stuff."

Definitely helps that, like 11:21, we saved a ton before our two kids were born and DH is very very cautious about spending. But even with two small kids, we still save a ton of money by not spending carelessly. We could afford up to $1.2M and comfortably make our mortgage payments, but DH won't even consider it. In fact, he's hoping that the home we buy is closer to $850K than $1M so that we have some cushion. [/quote]

See, personally, I would rather have some breathing room to go on a nice vacation or buy fancy cheese than have a $1 mil house!  [/quote]

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