Yes, but my understanding is that that situation was something of a historical aberration and probably not a duplicatable one.
I’ll never forget traveling up the main road from a southern Vietnamese province into Saigon a few years ago. Through the countryside, all along the side of the highway, there were workers’ houses. These were pretty ramshackle third-world affairs, and some of them even had dirt floors. Because of the climate, they were also quite open at the front, and passing travelers could see inside. And a majority of them had enormous wide screen televisions.
I agree about the added monthly cost increase of technology. I think paying hundreds each month for tv and phone services is crazy unless you really have the disposable income to not notice it. But to do so and have 5 figure credit card debt is nuts.
The childcare costs don’t seem out of line to me, though. I have my child in a very reasonable licensed home day care, and I pay $60 for 2 days for one child. So that’s $240 a month for day care for just part time, 2 days a week. When I was pricing out centers like Kindercare, I was quoted $50 per child per day. $300 a month would be a bargain for full time day care.
A lot of the things you’ve mentioned are pretty unnecessary. One does not need a new car every two years, the biggest television on the face of the planet*, a giant house, and all the toys you can manage with all the subscriptions available. Your coworkers are doubling up on a lot of stuff, and incurring a lot of debt because of it. The major message I got from your post was “don’t live beyond your means just for the sake of living beyond your means.”
I’ve been working in a car dealership for a while, and for the first few months, just about every salesman tried to sell me a new car and were baffled that I mentioned that the car ran “just fine” for my tastes and I didn’t need “an upgrade.”** Yes, it’s old, but it’s got low miles and most everything works well on it. Yes, the air conditioning doesn’t work, but I can pay to have that fixed for much cheaper than a monthly car payment which I cannot afford. Yes, I live in a big house. Yes, we’re renting. The thing is, we’re renting a big house (3bd/2ba) because it costs less than renting a 1 bedroom apartment in the area and because we were able to jump on an amazing deal.
When we look to buy houses, I’m hoping that, if we end up with a house with similar square footage, we can get something that fits my needs and wishes in regard to the layout. There’s a lot of space that’s not well-used in this house, and I honestly cannot say I’m super happy with the way it’s been constructed. Yes, it is nice, but it’s nice to rent, not nice to own. At this point, it may be better for us to save to have a house built to our specifications, as it’s difficult to find houses that are small enough, but still have things like an inner courtyard or private space to garden. I also don’t want to be paying HOA fees or having the same exact house as everyone else on the block.
Things are a lot more expensive, but at the same time, the economy is driven by those in society who are “living the lifestyle” by incurring massive amounts of debt. Living frugally is shunned by the average person, and advertising increases the demand for people to live beyond their means. Prices go up for several different reasons, but we’re also making more choices that are not fiscally conservative in nature.
[sub]*we’ve got two tvs, but they’re hand-me-down ones from the parents’ garage
**This phrase offends me in the context of buying a new product because the one you’ve already got isn’t fancy enough. If someone had ever said that to me about my engagement ring, they would be thoroughly walloped merely for trying to impose their ridiculous lifestyle on me and insulting me in the process.[/sub]
You are right…$50 a day per child is about what mine costs, and it’s by no means an elite daycare. The fanciest one around here that all the richies seem to send their kids to is twice that.
Agreed about the daycare. I have 2 YO twins and it turned out to be MUCH cheaper to hire a nanny at $10 an hour then to send them to any day care center around here. So at about 40 hr’s a week it’s $400 and if you want to get technical an divide that by 2 we talking about $200 per week for each kid.
The thing is, I can afford a $16 candle for myself, I just choose not to spend the money on it. Ever since we had a child, I’ve been less frivolous. I’m wearing clothes that are too tight and I never pay over $25 for a pair of shoes. Actually, I can’t remember the last time I bought shoes.
20% will never happen. I’m not sure what we’ll be able to do or when we’ll be able to do it. 
We’re paying $30/day, 5 days a week which works out to $600/mo. That’s a bargain around here. I’ve heard of people paying twice that much.
We would have a second child in a hearbeat if it weren’t for the cost of daycare. And since we’re not winning the lottery anytime soon (along with the fact that I’m 37 now), the baby factory is closed.
VCO3, do you ahve a Preferred Card at Jewel? Or, the Fresh Values at Dominick’s? I’m not trying to whoosh you, you can save a ton of money over the space of a year. And…cereal’s always discounted on the Preferred Card (as stated by the 2 boxes/week of Honey Nut Shredded Wheat -addict). How do I know the savings are large?
Point #2: Marry an accountant (or Life-Partner them…I don’t know you). I had a similar mindset to yours when I lived in Wrigleyville, and it was honestly beyond my every thought as to how I woudl ever afford a house. When an Accountant runs the family finances, you’d be surprised how much fluff gets cut out of the budget…and you won’t miss it!
Lastly…can you ditch the car and take publci transport? When I lived in “Chicago” (as per your sig line), I didn’t have a car. If you live and work downtown, take advantage of the fact you live in one of two American cities where this could work. Also, get a smaller car. In my 'burb, it takes $32-something to fill my Accord up from Empty.
OK, now lastly…if you find your $$ is going toward entertainment, go pick up a few shifts in a local bar. You can drink for cheap (via other bars’ Hospitality Nights), and it will lose its luster.
-Cem
Una, I normally look forward to your posts, but one has some strange things going on.
Your child care numbers are way off. The anti-sports thing, takes away from your main point, which is extremely valid. I agree with most of what you said, but even $100/month lawn care would be cheap. I do my own lawn care as it would cost me $100 per week. If I could get someone to do my lawn care for $100 per month, I would sign up for it in a heartbeat.
Mostly I am frugal, I am not happy that my combined HD Cable and High Speed internet & VOIP costs me around $140 per month, but that is a bargain compared to what you listed.
I think it is great that you will be retiring early, we would be, except we chose to have kids and so we hope to retire in our early sixties and be well set for hopefully a long retirement.
Nutty Bunny, again I am sorry, I completely misinterpreted your post. You sounded like some of my empty headed coworkers that cry poverty and then buy frivolous stuff. Obviously you are not. This is a common problem with message board communication I think.
Good Luck on that first house purchase. The tough part is that it really pays off to save a lot of money first, but while you are trying to save that money, rent eats away with little to show for it. My wife and I lived in a really cheap apartment, saved like crazy and bought our first place with only a $120K mortgage before we had kids. Even with that, we barely avoided PMI.
Jim
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not broke - the point of this thread isn’t about not having enough money. It’s about the costs of things always seeming to rise to take the same portion of money regardless of how much is actually going around.
I already do all of the things listed in this thread and more. I don’t carry debt. I use public transportation exclusively and fill up my car about once every two or three months. I don’t have cable TV, a cell phone, any subscriptions to anything other than Netflix, or anything like that. I buy mostly fresh groceries from local growers and farmer’s markets, then smaller stores, then big corporate grocery stores for necessities, and I of course submit to their stupid card system for “discounts.”
The reason I picked on sports was because…well, my co-workers do not have any other real indulgences. They do not read - reading is apparently for losers. They do not take life-enrichment-type courses (cooking classes, community college classes, etc.) They do not engage in their own personal sports - even the heavily drunken softball teams that were popular in the 1990’s among them have fallen completely by the wayside. They don’t have hobbies other than sports, they don’t collect things other than sports-related things, and they don’t work on individual projects except for things like making their own putting greens in their back yards. In fact, the only thing that could come close to their sports obsessions is their obsessions with having perfect putting-green-esque lawns.
In short, before too many other people chime in, the reason I mentioned sports is because, to the best of my knowledge, that’s all they’re interested in.
I don’t have children, and never will, so it turns out I mis-remembered, because I don’t pay much attention to those numbers. So I asked around how much people here were spending. I’m hearing values of like $1000 a month (for 2 kids), with one fellow spending $3000+ a month to have his single child in a private religious academy which has, so he claims, armed guards to protect them from “certain religious people” who I will not mention here.
There is no “anti-sports thing.” If my co-workers were obsessed the same way over Jazz, D&D, or quilting I would have posted such.
In the case of child care, I was clearly mistaken. In this case, I meant to say “per week.”
VC03 , do what I did.
Marry money.
Mr. Neville and I recently bought a house, and that number seemed high to me, too. It might make sense if that number included property taxes and mortgage insurance.
After I had my previous car for three years (and again recently, now that I’ve had my current car for three years), my dad starts saying I should get a new one. But for me, three years is about when I start remembering what my car looks like and stop looking for the old one in parking lots, and when I can pretty reliably remember which side the gas cap is on.
People do “upgrade” their engagement rings, though…
Cool, it looked like an anti-sports thing. I am glad it wasn’t. Your Co-worker do sound worse than normal.
I do have at least one friend that goes nuts on Cars. Every few years he gets a new one and he is paying someone to restore a 1973 Cougar. I could see the classic car as a hobby if you did most of the work yourself, but he does none of the work. To me, he is just wasting money at this point. But, it is his money and he never cries poverty at least.
I am sports sensitive as I do technically waste a lot of money of Yankee Tickets most years.
I forgot to add, Summer Day Camps around here get expensive, for roughly 9 weeks it works out to between $5000 to $10000 for two kids. This stinks. We did not take a travel vacation, as the camp was so expensive. Child Care is very expensive these days. We were close to $9000 for a great camp; I preferred the Y’s camp at $5000, as $4,000 would pay for a great vacation.
Jim
300 bucks a month! Good lord - I’m paying three times that! And that’s average!
(now admittedly that’s full time daycare for a 1 year old, but still!)
She corrected that above, sometimes it pays to read ahead. 
Well, that’s just inflation, as I think you said in your OP. I think we are actually doing pretty well if wages go up at the same rate as the cost of living.
Right, and if you really only work 3.5 hours per day, those efforts at economizing sound just about right to me. You were right in that other thread…work for a lot of people is a means to an end…you can work more and make more money, or you can have more free time and make less money. You have decided that playing in your band is more important than buying stuff, and that’s a perfectly valid decision, but it is your decision, and you have to accept the consequences.
Of course, you missed out on a chance to have a few of us buy your drinks for a night, last month…
And there was SOOO much leftover pizza it wasn’t even funny.
Just sayin’
I don’t earn a lot of money, since I am chronically under-employed or unemployed, but I partially make up for that by being frugal by nature and nurture. I have the knack for living on next to nothing, and I’m the one responsible for running our household. It’s working for us.