We live in a house that costs less than half of what we could allegedly afford on our income. We buy low-end cars and keep them for 10 years. Our family vacations were so small-scale that our kids had never been on an airplane until their senior year of college, when one flew to job interviews and the other to visit graduate schools.
Both of our kids had the good fortune to be accepted to their first-choice colleges, and both were able to attend those colleges even though they were not eligible for need-based aid. They have no undergraduate debt, and we don’t have any debt connected with their undergraduate education, either. One of them attended our flagship state university by choice (we got a bargain there), but the other went to an Ivy League school (which was a tad expensive). We had no trouble paying.
I’m proud that we were able to do this for our children, just as my parents were proud to be able to do it for my sister and me a generation earlier.
Would we do the same thing again? Hell, yes, and with no regrets.