<p>While a lot of readers focus on the “bought a new car this past year so our son could earn money for college delivering pizzas” part. I think this story comes as a good reference point.</p>
<p>They know about “Ivy League College”. They are spending about 15% of their gross for two CC students. </p>
<p>Besides other high expenses, their view point on their food expenses gets my interest. They think $1000/month “budget just provides the basics for four people”. I think it takes a lot less than $1000 to provide the basics for 4 people if you cook most of the meals at home.</p>
<p>Would this be an example that the parents big spending is costing their children’s education? Sounds like they should be able to afford State schools if they don’t buy a new car and save from other expenses.</p>
<p>This couple is probably in their 40’s-50’s, they don’t have any debt besides their mortgage- which will be paid off in 10 years.
So exactly what is the problem?They are ahead financially from most families.</p>
$ 350 a month for utilities,
$ 300 for car insurance,
$ 175 for Internet, cable and phone.
$1222 a month on our mortgage
$ 250 a month extra on the mortgage
$ 300 on a car loan.
$ 500 a month on gasoline
$ 800 on retirement
$1250 for college ($15,000 a year for tuition and books)
$1000 a month on food.
That’s about $6100/month, or $74K right there. They don’t mention health insurance costs.</p>
<p>Add in income and property taxes, and there isn’t a whole lot left over, if anything.</p>
<p>$1000/month for food sounds like a lot, but on a per-diem basis for 4 people (two of which are teen-age boys) you are looking at about $8/day per person. While not exactly beans-and-rice territory, it doesn’t sound like they are eating out every meal either.</p>
<p>So while this family is doing OK, and are actually saving money for retirement and college, it doesn’t sound like they are living extravagantly, either.</p>
<p>When D brings her very tall boyfriend over to stay, it REALLY gets expensive. Big guys eat alot. When she first brought him home we invited them out for sushi. She informed me that that would be unwise. She was right. The tab was not 25 to 20% higher, it was double. </p>
<p>But these folks do need to kick in a couple of beans and rice days. As most of us do. After all, I am still making payments on that sushi bill.</p>
<p>My son is 13 and has taken to eating dinner twice a day now. He eats breakfast, usually cereal or some frozen thing, we pack his lunch which is always turkey on something, fruit, a snack and water. He comes home from school and eats a snack of some sort, often frozen pizza or a tv dinner or a slice of pizza from the pizzeria. Then he eats dinner and has dessert. Finally, around 8:30 he either goes for the leftovers or eats almost another entire meal. He is 5’5 and 96 pounds.
My husband is also a staggeringly big eater. He finds it his responsibility to eat everything on the table at a meal, even if it was planned for two meals. I’m a vegetarian, so my veggies can be pretty pricy.</p>
I hold out hope that when he’s done growing, his eating might slow down. He’s growing around an inch a month right now. THis is what I tell myself because I do a serious, responsible grocery shop every week and I can’t keep enough food in the house for him! He’s not a huge junk food eater, either, thank goodness, but his eating habits couldn’t be more different from his sisters’ at the same age.</p>
<p>Just also notice from the list above. They missed quite a few expenses: i.e. Clothes, entertainments, christma gifts, vacations, car maintainance, home maintainance, etc. </p>
<p>We have been fighting with an A/C leaking problem every year ever since we got into this old house. Knock on the wood that they fixed THE problem last summer.</p>
<p>One of the problems with things like salaries and such is people forget about the varied cost of living in this country, especially for housing and things like taxes and even food. 100,000 a year as family income means something very different in the NYC area or sections of California then it does in let’s say Florida or Georgia or upstate NY. 100000 a year in some areas is a young fortune, it represents really making it (in a place for example where average salaries are less then the 50k figure someone cited) in others it represents maybe middle class. There are places where a typical 3 bedroom house is 150k or less, in places like the NYC area that same house would probably be min 400k and with higher prices for housing comes higher prices for insurance and taxes and the like and other things including food are going to be more expensive as well. Obviously, some of the issues are also lifestyle, if you are someone who when they buy a new car has to have that huge SUV that costs 40 grand or more, very different then someone who buys a cheaper car or buys used, for example, so that factors in as well. 1000 a month for food may not be that much if you live in an area where food is expensive, even cooking at home it can be expensive (and if you live in Hawaii, well, that isn’t unusual, things are expensive there). </p>
<p>Some of it also has to do with expectations and lifestyle, a lot of people make it on a lot less then 100k, but also don’t have money saved for college or for retirement, and the person making 100k complaining might have both as critical and that cramps how much that 100k is worth as well.</p>
<p>One way to look at this might be to take where these people are living and adjust their family income to various regions; 100k in some areas might be equivalent to making 60k another place, for example.</p>
<p>One of the more amazing things is how terms like middle class are used, in many cases the term belies any easy labelling. There are people who make less then the median salary who consider themselves middle class, there are people making several times the median salary who consider themselves ‘middle class’, and yet there are also people whose family income is prob 100k who complain of having trouble making a ‘middle class existence’ in their minds (while their lifestyle was often pretty middle class). I once lived in a neighborhood in NYC where a lot of the people living there worked for NYC, had two incomes, and prob had family incomes well above what we had at the time (we were both young, starting out in jobs), and many of the neighbors complained that they didn’t make enough, were trying to get into the ‘middle class’, while we considered ourselves that…these were people who had decent cars, went on vacations, did all the things you would consider middle class, yet they considered themselves struggling working class in many ways…</p>
<p>Vacations?? We took our first one in MANY years this year…and our younger child is almost two years OUT of college. Clothes?? Read the “Good Buy of the Day” thread and you can read about mine. Entertainment? Like what would this be? Concerts (not in this house), theater (once a year), sports events (nope)…entertainment here is having friends over for a pot luck dinner.</p>
<p>THIS makes me SO MAD!!! My boyfriend does that, too. I always make like ten servings of everything to freeze to save time/money so I don’t have to cook every night and so we can stop spending $200-$250 on groceries every week and he eats EVERYTHING!!! And then gets mad about how much money we’re spending on my dairy-free cream cheese at whole foods, which is one of only three things we buy there instead of meijer (which is the equivalent of walmart around here, for those unfamiliar.) Nevermind his like 20 yogurts a week or his blatant refusal to eat anything that doesn’t come out of a box.</p>
<p>Jokes on him, now I eat tons of vegetables and he refuses to eat anything that grows. Half our refridgerator is just different kinds of lettuce. I have to outsmart him to keep food on the table.</p>
I think the key there is the use of the term “middle class” versus “middle income.” My husband works for NYC and makes a six figure salary, as do I, but since we didn’t have college educations and make a lot of our income from overtime, we consider ourselves working “class” and I know that’s the same with a lot of his co-workers and similarly situated workers who make good money and have excellent benefits. It’s sort of strange in a way that it’s the uneducated municipal workers, who do jobs that aren’t always pleasant or safe, who have the million dollar pensions, while the educated people do not. I’m not sure what to make of that.</p>
<p>I see your point, but I also think that those people probably wouldn’t be able to retire without those pensions, and will probably NEED to retire sooner given the nature of their work. Personally, as an educated person without a pension, that’s not a trade off I’d like to make.</p>
<p>I think what grates me most about this article is the usage of the word “poor”. Sure, if you asked me twenty years ago what sort of lifestyle would I be living based on my current income, I would have said “lavish”. But in reality I still must watch my nickels, I do manage to travel but only with my FF miles, and I still can’t get myself to buy anything at full retail price…but I would never use the word “poor”. Poor people can’t afford to pay a mortgage or buy their kids new cars to deliver pizza.</p>
You and me both! The difference is my husband will eat anything. Last night I made myself a braised and then sauteed cabbage, which is among my favorite things to eat. It’s time consuming and has butter so I don’t make it too often, and when I do make it it cooks down to not a lot from a whole head of cabbage. He went to take some last night and I got annoyed because it really was only one serving and he had an entire chicken.</p>
<p>You would probably think I’m the most evil person in the world, but I’m not above removing food from the table so he can’t eat it.</p>