My old boss, who I love, grossed over $12,000 EACH MONTH
. Also had a spouse with a good-paying full-time job. Also made extra money on a regular basis. They were always concerned about money and worried about not having enough. This was a good lesson for me. I knew then that unless I changed myself, it would never be enough. Our society runs on wanting more all the time. How could someone with that much actually worry about bouncing checks?
We have a complicated financial history in our 5 year marriage since dh was a student for 2 years and since we started our marriage relatively "rich" due to some inheritance money. We now live on dh's salary of about 54K. On paper, this is enough for all of our needs, minus maternity insurance for me.
Once I left my job, the cost of adding ds and myself to dh's ins. was over $600/month. I feel like this is ridiculous! Our largest expense is college loans: about $450/month. We have a car note of $280 since we opted for a new car to make dh's commute of one hour each way better/safer. Our other car is paid for. Car and house and health insurance, plus utilities and groceries really add up. We also tithe 10%. We never seem to have money left over at the end of the month. We eat out too much, and neither of us is willing to be the "budget police". However, we are depleting our small savings, so this will soon become necessary.
We have made some poor financial decisons, and hopefully have learned a lot on the front end of our lives. By far, our best financial decision was to buy a cheap house. I'm not sure what many of you mean by "ghetto", but I know that we LOVE our house and neighborhood even though many friends think we live in a rough part of town. (One woman came over and said 3 times upon arrival, "you didn't tell me that you live in such a terrible neighborhood." I finally said, "we don't.") We spent 57K on our 1140 sf house, then put about 15K into fixing it up. We were amazed that friends would spend 100K on dumpy little newish places in a better part of town. We pay $363/month mortgage and about $1000/year in repairs and are able to walk downtown. Our neighborhood is very diverse, but we feel that this is extremely healthy, and a big plus. (We also have a rottweiler who weighs 120!
)
Right now, our major goal is to get out of debt. We owe about 40K in student loans. We spent all of last year getting out of cc debt, which we will now avoid like the plague that it is. We would like to get out of debt and then figure out a way for dh to work less than he does, so that he can spend time with our family and pursue interests outside of work.
By far the hardest thing for us is to sidestep materialism. We feel that it is important to our faith that we not focus on material goods. However, this has been difficult for us so far. Right now, we are considering moving to a very rural area in part to work on this. If we see a river every day, instead of a new cool mini cooper, perhaps we can slowly better appreciate the REAL good things in life. I have my doubts about whether this will "work", but am willing to try it. I desire to live a life NOT centered around paychecks and money. Thanks for the encouraging stories on this board.
It just 
