I ask this as an honest question, because it’s seeming to me like maybe the answer is yes.
I starting pondering this topic after we left a nice dinner party (full of other couples about our age and in similar stages of life) and my husband said: “I think we were the only people in there who actually like our lives.”
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We were able to score the following flights for super cheap this summer (with first class tickets roundtrip on the PHX-SEA portion):
In case you can’t see that image, our summer will include flights between FLG, PHX, ORD, YVR, and SEA – basically a giant triangle around the U.S. mainland with a little taste of British Columbia thrown in.
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The short answer is that he doesn’t need one. Let’s unpack that statement with some frequently asked questions that we get on this subject.
Depends who you ask, I guess.
We’re both at the upper end of the Millennial generation. We both have smartphones and various social media accounts. We both work with kids and teenagers in our careers. We use computers, phones, and other modern technology frequently for our jobs and have lots of random unnecessary electronic devices in our house. I don’t think we’re too far out of touch.
As you may already know, we got a quite a few awesome questions after sharing some details on the oh-so-taboo topics of our personal finances. You can click here for all the “money” posts (haha).
If you don’t want to read any of that but need a quick re-hash: we spent less than $80k in 2018 including all those fancy trips, we hit the milestone of repaying $500k in business loans in February, and in April I paid off the last of my gargantuan student loans. Yipee!
Anyway, several of the questions/ comments we’ve had about money things have been related to cost of living, which I did my best to address in my last post.
Before we get to the main topic of this post (fancypants lifestyles without a doctor’s income), let me address three comments that keep coming up in various forms: …
Wow, those last couple posts about money brought a few haters out of the woodwork!
In case you missed them, I’m talking about the post sharing our family’s spending in 2018 and the post about paying off my student loans.
I got a bunch of readers who were super supportive and enthusiastic, which was unexpected and very much appreciated. I got many a “Congratulations!!!” message about the student loans, as well as a lot of great questions about the details of our lifestyle and debt repayment.
It was overall really fun to share all that information with the internet world.
Last month was our second trip to Hawaii as a family of 4!
We are two adults, one 12 year-old, and one 21 month-old (who completed his 27th flight as a “lap baby” on this trip).
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In February of this year, I made some calls to the lovely folks at the Department of Education and Student Aid and confirmed that from 2005 to 2013 I took out almost $350,000 IN STUDENT LOANS!
The exact total amount of money I borrowed for school – including tuition, fees, supplies, and “cost of living” funds – was $347,634.
That total is principal only and includes none of the interest accumulation, which was quite significant over the course of all those years.
The loans were dispersed between 2005, when I started dental school, and 2013, when I finished my specialty residency.
I had no debt coming out of undergrad, which I finished in 3 years at an in-state university. I got an academic scholarship and worked two jobs during college. And before that I went to a public high school and worked at a bakery, in case anyone is keeping score.
My husband and I are now on our 18th winter of driving non-fancy 2WD cars in snowy climates. Locations we’ve driven said cars during winter include most of Colorado, Chicago and other “lake effect snow” parts of the Midwest, and our current mountainous hometown, which averages 100 inches of snow per year in town (double that on the higher mountains around us).
This past winter brought us one storm with over 35 inches of snow in 24 hours.
Our current vehicles are both 2WD. They were made in 2004 and 2007, were bought with cash, and cost us less than $100/mo total to insure. The costs for gas and regular maintenance (oil changes, etc) are negligible.
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As you may have picked up from some of our previous posts, we like a good adventure. We realize they’re not all winners, and in fact some of them are solidly in the “once was enough” category, but we like to feel like we’re doing stuff. We also realize that being bored is a first-world problem, and we own that.
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We’ve been able to fly Hawaiian Airlines quite a few times – domestically and internationally, economy and first class – but it’s only in the last 12 months that we’ve flown HA with the kids.
The first trip to Hawaii with the kids was a wonderful week in Maui March of 2018, when Baby J was 9 months old. You can read here about the costs of the entire trip, as well as comparable costs if we had paid cash. …