Reply to Middle middle class & lower middle class: What Middle Schools do we end up in?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]$170k, 1 kid.  We went private for MS, may stay private but prefer public HS.  DC has more good HS options than MS.  [/quote]

Since this is anonymous, may I ask you 2 questions (ballpark answers obviously are fine, don't have to be exact):

1. About how much is your total annual school costs (tuition, books, before/after care if you use it) for private middle school?

2. About how much is your mortgage or rent?

Our HHI is less than yours, we have 1 kid, and I'm trying to get a ballpark (even though I know there are a million other variables) to how your situation compares to ours.  I would have assumed we could never afford private MS (we can barely afford aftercare at our current charter!) but I honestly haven't looked at the tuitions, so I really don't know.[/quote]

1)  the total annual school costs are about $31,000 per year.  It's tuition, a few fees that cover athletics, field trips, etc., and bus transportation.
2)  our mortgage is $1500 per month.  Yes, we bought in DC when there was a crack house a couple of houses over.  Now that house would sell for $500k.

How we afford it is this -- no standing bills that are high, like a car payment.  We take in about $8500 or so in a regular month, post taxes.  Each month about $3000 gets zapped out of our bank account to go to the school, 10 months a year.  So in a regular month, you have to live on $5500 a month or use savings.  We can't quite do that, so we go into savings a bit on those months.  But several months a year you get an extra pay check (26 pay periods in a year).  So in those two months you can make it.  If you get a tax return, then that's how the extra is covered that month.  A bonus at work = that's how you cover it.  In the end we made it work for the most part.  My parents gave us some money which helped a couple of months.  If it gets tight I'll borrow using the HELOC -- pretty low interest rate.

You have to really watch every penny that you have coming in, scrub your budget for things you can cut.  I put everything on mint -- you can see how your money is spent.  We wasted a lot of money in years before, just stupid stuff that we should have known better.  Mint helps point that out.  You see everything, you see patterns, you see places where it makes sense to cut.  Get your bills as low as possible and put any extra into a rainy day fund.  That's how we are doing it.[/quote]

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