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Comment by throwaway0516 | Hacker News Reader

We make a little over $500K and I would not say we are struggling day to day, but we won't have so much saved as people expect. We lead a modest life (live in an apt, drive a compact) and live in SV.

Monthly House rent is $3000, Kids schools is $2400, kids activities is $2000, groceries and eating out is $1500, travel expenses averaged is $1000, misc expenses (gas,utils,shopping,car maint) is $2000. We do not have any debt.

We pay over $160k in federal/state income taxes and save $38k in 401k, $15k in 529 accounts annually.

Most of these expenses are regular day to day expenses we can't cut down on to save more.

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Kids school could be zero if you would go to public school. You can eat out less and eat cheaper food at home cutting the grocery bill by a lot. You don't have to travel. Your misc expenses seem high as well, you could buy an older reliable car (some cars are much cheaper to maintain than others). You could probably get a cheaper house.

You don't WANT to do those things - I don't blame you - but that doesn't mean you can't.

3000/m on 500/y is extremely inexpensive. They will not find cheaper for 4 people without driving up transportation costs and killing leisure time. They probably have an affordable car, as compacts tend not to be "luxury" cars with many bells and whistles to maintain. Tuition, well, you pay for what's important to you, and obviously they would rather dump this into the kids than saving. Hardly worth criticizing as excess. Groceries and eating out are not going to get cheaper. They are already less than $10 per day per person. Again, one couldn't call that excessive.

$3000 monthly is less than 10% of the household income so I don't see how that could ever be considered frivolous.

Public schools are no good in SV, so either I have to spend $4500 as rent in a good school district or spend low in rent and send kids to private school. And $3000 is the cheapest you can get in a decent location in SV

You can go to a public school but if you want it to be a quality one your rent of a house will not be a 3k.

After your expenses, you still have 28k (post tax $ per month) - 12 (added all your expenses) ~ 16k per month = 192k per annum. 192 - 38 - 15 = 139k still left after taxes, expenses, 401k, and 529. Isn't that a really huge number?

it didn't look like an itemized list of every single expense he expects to pay over the year, just some of the big ticket items. he's not filing his taxes with his comment.

ya..usually $100K-$125K is the range of our savings. I don't it is really a huge amount of savings when earning over $500K.

> kids activities is $2000

Woah... My wife is a teacher and grosses $2000/month.

This is a crazy thing to spend 2,000 on.

two kids..swimming, dance etc. They all add-up.

Perhaps it's worth considering that to many of us these figures are just astronomically high. We know things add up, and have already considered this. What we're struggling with is how a few classes can add up to $500 per week.

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