Reply to Middle class life has me completely baffled

Forum Index » Money and Finances

Reply to "Middle class life has me completely baffled"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Honestly, I'm wondering where your money goes. Our mortgage is lower than your rent, but we save about 40k a year after maxing retirement. [/quote]

Bills (quoted below all in per mo.)

Car insurance: $150 
Phone bill: 100
internet: 90
gas+electric: 80
rent: 1700
groceries: 300
parking: 70

About $2900 per month in left over cash after subtracting out all taxes and required payments for healthcare and pension contributions.  We are also also putting away $300 per mo. right now into a 'new car pot' for the eventual day that we will need to buy a new car (ours is 4 years old right now), $1000 per month into free cash flow for emergency savings and rainy day funds that I really wouldn't want to tap in case of job loss or health care disaster.  That only leaves about $1600 per month to save for a new house.   Mind you, I also assumed $0 for leisurely activities, expenses if a wedding comes up, buying new clothes, car maintenance/repair, and other miscellaneous expenses.  In reality, the amount we are able to save is more close to $1000-1200 per month for a house after all is said and done.  Even 10% down on a modestly priced house of $500-600k will take several years, assuming absolutely zero goes wrong financially. [/quote]

I don’t understand how this is all you have in take home pay even with maxing out retirement.  My husband maxes his retirement and makes 160k and his take home pay after everything else taken out is 8600 per month.  Yours is adding up to about 2k less.

I don’t really understand where all your money is going but 3.5 years ago we were making a HHI the same as you and not only paid for our own modest wedding but then was able to save for a small down payment on a house in one year (like 25k) and bought a starter home for 450k at the time. We had no help from parents other than setting us up without students loans.  Our hhi has increased to 300k since then and we have one kid in preschool and another on the way plus 200k in equity in the starter home.

It wasn’t that difficult honestly and it’s not like we were eating rice and beans when we were in your position either.[/quote]

See the other post, I broke it down better.[/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