<p>It wouldn’t be difficult to spend $575 a week on food, especially if you are buying expensive meats, and cheese. However, I don’t find it a very sympathetic data point on why somebody can “feel broke” despite earning a lot of money. I have a lot more sympathy for people with unexpected job losses, medical expenses, or upside down mortgages. </p>
<p>I’d put it this way: if you ever buy laundry detergent when it’s not on sale, don’t cry to me about feeling broke. </p>
<p>My favorite financial writer Andrew Tobias says, “A luxury once sampled becomes a necessity.” You can get the luxury budget at a significantly lesser price but in substantially larger quantities at Costco. Raspberries especially. But, back to our regularly scheduled programming, that is why if one moves to a town where people regularly have gardeners, drive high-end cars, send their kids to private school, it feels like you are just getting by on $250K or $400K. And, as someone pointed out, taxes will be a lot higher. Real estate taxes for the nice house. But, it is possible to get by on less. </p>
<p>We have been fortunate in life and have lots of friends who have been similar or more so. I believe that for years we spent less than almost all of them and often less than people with likely significantly lower income. Our friends couldn’t understand some of our choices, but it has left us feeling comfortable about paying for kids schools (full pay including an MBA) and now traveling at a higher level than when we did and not running out of money later on in life. </p>
<p>Have you noticed, Shawbridge, that the raspberry containers at Costco now have a center divider, so they may be a little less smooshed, but also I think the quantity is less as well. Still love them, and the price. Blueberries too.</p>
<p>I think what is hard is to determine what we consider a luxury and what we consider a reasonable expense, for the purposes of determining what someone should be expected to pay for college.</p>
<p>As someone who grew up in a family of four making in the ballpark of 100K, shopping for steak, wine and organic veggies at Whole Foods, taking trips to Europe as more than a once in a childhood occurrence, and living in a million dollar house is obviously in the realm of extreme luxury to me. But while I think my family - who got quite a bit of fin aid when I went to college - was pretty frugal, looking back, we too made a lot of choices that would seem extravagant to someone of a lower socioeconomic status. My parents could have afforded a bigger house than the one they bought - but they could also have raised a family of four in a smaller one, and in fact my mom grew up in a family of five that lived in a two bedroom apartment without being considered “poor.” They didn’t move to Manhattan or send us to private school, but they did choose a town with high property taxes because of the good public schools, even though the considerably less expensive neighboring town had adequate ones as well. They drove ten year old Honda Civics, but never considered not having two cars, even though they could probably have lived on one for much of my childhood, and while we only took a big foreign vacation once, we did take it – and took smaller trips to places like Disney and Cape Cod and Niagra Falls once a year.</p>
<p>That’s not to say I don’t think one can rationally distinguish between the spending of the family with the million dollar house and the one with the 3BR, 1.5 bath split level - but it is worth considering that for someone living in more reduced or even really impoverished circumstances, both lifestyles would include a lot of non-essentials. </p>
<p>The USDA has a really cool chart outlining four food spending models and the 7/2014 puts a “thrifty” family of four at $568 per month and the most liberal (expensive) plan at $1107.</p>
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I am all over that!! Red or white??</p>
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<p>I propose that Gourmetmom starts a recipe thread in the Parent Cafe. I want to make these!</p>
<p>I will also add that I am really glad it’s my daughter and not my (bigger) son who needs the fruit fix. I can usually make a pint of raspberries last a couple of days if we have multiple other fruit options on hand as well.</p>
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<p>It’s not just NYC and NJ and San Francisco that have high taxes. I pay almost $7000 a year for a 1200-sf house (not even in the best grade-school district) in a midwestern college town. And my house is only appraised at $269K (hopefully it is worth quite a bit more–I pity the person who buys it from me!).</p>
<p>Just one more food comment. My local butcher became my family’s best friend about 10 yrs ago. High quality beef and chicken, organic fed, somewhat higher than supermarket price but far superior in quality so we just don’t eat as much meat. The trade off is worth it. They also discount for bulk. Service is custom and superior and friendly. During farmers market season, they carry some local vegetables. It is a family cooks dream. During holidays, the high end food is fantastic but it doesn’t have to be expensive to be quality.</p>
<p>@sally305, I would love a recipe thread! </p>
<p>Fruit can often be the killer, especially if your kids end up not eating it fast enough – raspberries get moldy pretty quickly.</p>
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<p>Property taxes in California can vary quite a bit, due to the infamous Prop 13. We bought our house in 1999 (and at the time we worried we were buying at the top of the housing bubble!), so it’s probably worth twice what we paid for it – but our property taxes are still tied to the original appraisal and can only go up by, I think, 2% per year. There are seniors living on fixed incomes whose homes are probably worth millions of dollars but whose property taxes are tiny because they’ve lived in that house for 50 years.</p>
<p>My family averaged $100/wk on groceries for the 4 of us, so about $25/person. I’ve stuck pretty close to this in college, and my friends can’t understand how. But I always felt like we ate very well. We’d shop on sale and stock up, cook dinner from scratch nearly every night (my brother and I both had a night each week we were responsible for dinner, starting in elementary school), and go out maybe once a month. My parents both worked full time. Some of my favorite memories are of making dinner together at the end of long days and baking pizza on Fridays. And when we went on vacation, it was usually camping. I loved planning out our meals and cooking them on the fire and the camp stove. I can’t fathom going out for every meal on vacation. It would be so expensive and that would just be so much food!</p>
<p>Kind of a tangent, but my point is that it’s easy to forget that what’s “normal” for us isn’t necessarily for anyone else. My boyfriend eats dinner/lunch out way more than I do, and when I visited his family, I realized that was because that was the norm for him and what he grew up with. People make different choices about how to spend their money - and sometimes it’s a necessity.</p>
<p>@Gourmetmom, please do let us know here when you start a recipe thread.</p>
<p>I didn’t get the purpose of the detailing of how one gets to $575/week on food, since isn’t it kind of obvious that anyone <em>could</em> spend as much as they wanted on pretty much any category? But what did that have to do with whether that was a “reasonable” cost or not? I mean, I could say I spent $700 on Jimmy Choos (hypothetically) but that has nothing to do with whether a $700/month personal shoe allowance is “reasonable” or that cutting into it would be a sacrifice. </p>
<p>Those making $200K should live as though they make $100K. There are plenty of families at that income level all over the US. The difference can go to savings.</p>
<p>^Speaking of which, what do these people wear? No clothing in the WSJ video budget. I guess our hypothetical $450,000 family are nudists. ;)</p>
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<p>They wear clothes of magical threads that are only visible to their over-privileged, self-absorbed peers…</p>
<p>Are those the ones with the big giant logos?</p>
<p>big giant logos are for the hoi polloi</p>
<p>Those making $200K should live as though they make $100K. There are plenty of families at that income level all over the US. The difference can go to savings.</p>
<p>Those aren’t our numbers, but we have lived well below our means for years. We contemplated buying a house in our town in a more expensive neighborhood and everytine we drive by H and I say to one another we are glad we didn’t. Too many expectations of keeping up with the Joneses. </p>
<p>My spouse and I make $150,000 per year together, our EFC is $30,000 to $35,000 depending on which college NPC you ask (there are at least two main methods of calculating it).</p>
<p>I find it interesting, to think that if you are making $200,000 per year, $50,000 per year more than we do, you can’t pay the $30,000 or so EFC that my family can get in grants or loans.</p>
<p>It doesn’t make sense. Folks in that range should be free and clear, without savings, unless they are living in a million-dollar house and going on $10,000 vacations several times per year.</p>
<p>We go on vacation every other year We go out to eat twice per week, $100 a pop for our family. We buy new clothes for our kids every year. We support my in-laws who don’t have much money at all.</p>
<p>We’ll take loans on our 401k’s to send my son to college. Hopefully, we can do that for each of them. And not go on vacation.</p>
<p>But $200,000 per year or more, unless you have to buy Italian suits to go to work, you should be good.</p>