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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

A lot of this advice is unrealistic.

How many people are going to be able to live on one spouse's income alone? Of those who can, how many will want that second income vs time with the kids?

About not getting into debt, how many people are can go to college ("invest in yourself") without?

IMO the only good piece of advice is "be smart about probabilities", which if you follow it to its logical conclusion basically just means be informed about the facts, a general piece of life advice that makes a lot of sense.

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I don’t think it’s unrealistic at all. My wife and I have always lived on one income. Before we had kids, we used the other to pay off our college debt very quickly and build as much savings/retirement as possible. It also taught us to narrow the set of physical goods we valued in life. We are now living very comfortably on one (modest) income with 3 kids.

As far as never going into debt, I think you should interpret that a bit more loosely. Obviously, going to college has huge payoffs in a few short years. That is more of an investment as long as one chose and affordable college. Taking out a loan on a new BMW or Tesla is debt.

> I don’t think it’s unrealistic at all. My wife and I...

Come on now. It's about what is generally achievable. Imagine living in London on £25K, which is roughly the median. If you find another median salary, are you gonna save it all? Unlikely.

So you mention "generally achievable" and then bring up London in the same sentence? Really? Vast majority of British people don't live in London. It's like saying that home ownership is UK is unachievable because no one in London can afford to buy anymore. Which is true, but it has nothing to do with the rest of the country.

Well unless you talk about city states, the vast majority of the population of any country is not living in any particular city in that state.

Salaries in the rest of the country are lower, so you'd be making a similar comparison with let's say $20K in eg Sheffield.

Obviously there's people living on that budget, but the point of the advice was to not break that budget, even if twice the amount were available.

Which even if you're very frugal you are unlikely to do. You're gonna think of something to spend that extra 20K on, and it's not dumb to spend at least some of it.

To me the advice sounds like "if you and your wife are partners in law firms, save half the money".

So don't live in London.

I'm moving out because it's an inheritance society. You need an income of more than 150-200K to buy a family home that isn't crap by the standards of anyone outside of the bubble.

It really is that simple. London is closed to newcomers. Go and have your fun as a youngster - but setting up there is daft unless you're an entrepreneur and will actually make big money.

Can you clarify modest income? The last time I read an article about living on one income the spouse was a high paid lawyer. The person in the article who talked about living on one income was a CEO.

I make about £40k a year which is neither low nor very high by British standards and we could survive on my salary alone. Take home per month is about £2300, the mortgage is £700 a month which leaves plenty of money for bills and food and other expenses.

That seems fairly high for the UK. “The median annual income in the UK, according to the most recent Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, is £28,677 for full-time employees.” 1.4x the median income is comparable to many dual income families in the UK.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Number_of_Individuals_i...

That seems to me to fit with the characterization "neither low nor very high".

Not so high. Also, that includes younger people than a person with 3 kids, and people who chose not to attend higher education. Presumably the median for his age group and education level is higher.

If you carefully run the numbers a model 3 will pencil out quite a bit better than F-150 unless the truck is for work.

A few years ago I did the same with a Prius and surprisingly, if you drive a lot, a Prius was the cheapest car you could buy.

> About not getting into debt, how many people are can go to college ("invest in yourself") without?

Like 95% of the rest of the developed world ;)

I only know a single "developed" country in which you have to indebt yourself to go to college, and that's the US.

Are there any others?

Even in Northern Europe where tuition is free, students often take out loans to support themselves during uni.

Source: I grew up in one of those places, plenty of people will borrow from the government on top of what they are given.

Well in Poland university is free as it is in most post-communist EU, Scandinavia, and some other EU countries.

Yeah you still have to have the money for food and place to live, but you'd need that anyway, and it's not that expansive. Most people get these money from their parents without loaning any money from banks.

Just want to point out that the nature of these loans (at least in Sweden) differs greatly from student loans in the US. Interest rates and downpayments are low, and if you can’t afford to pay off your loans for a period (due to no or low income), you can get a temporary reduction of the amount you have to pay off every month. I maxed out my loans when I studied, at about $26k, and the maximum I have to pay monthly is ~$55 a month

> Even in Northern Europe where tuition is free, students often take out loans to support themselves during uni.

FWIW I wasn't suggesting that students in other countries don't take any loans, I was pointing out that they don't necessarily have to.

In Germany, for example, there is a government loan system for studying, where you get enough per month, and only have to pay back ~20 months of it (which is a fraction of the time in college), and can pay it back under quite good conditions. In Spain, it is common for students to live with their families, work, or for their families to help them a bit.

Many students don't take a loan, and ether work ~15h/week, or get money from parents, or both. Even poor families are able to push 2 children through college without accumulating debt.

If tuition here were to cost, e.g, 3000 EUR/year, many families and students wouldn't be able to do that. If tuition were to cost 20k EUR or more / year, most families would need to indebt themselves.

The UK, £9000 per year plus living costs is the current floor.

However it is more like a graduate tax than loan, if you don't earn much you don't pay it back and it gets written off after 25 years.

The £9,250 annual tuition fee is for England only. Tuition fees imposed by the votes of Scottish MPs overriding the votes of English (& Welsh) MPs. But they knew their own kids would unaffected because tuition fees in Scotland are zero if you are Scottish (or an EU resident). There's a special fee applied if you are English though.

It's 25 years for the £3k fees, 30 years for £9k

I would say it's unusual but not unrealistic.

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