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This is interesting! We live in the most expensive city in the country and make 4x the median income. We rent a 1br apt in a pricey, fun neighborhood and don’t feel like we can afford o buy when a 2br apt can cost $1.7M! If we lived elsewhere we would be in a very different place financially but so far we’ve prioritized living in fun cities over having lots of space. That may change now that LO is here. We do contribute to our 401Ks at the max, have no debt, and have a good emergency fund.

@pinkcupcake: I googled median income and it popped up my metropolitan area/state.

@crazydoglady: thx! Very helpful.

we make 1.25 medium income for our neighborhood and things are tight. our rent is even subsidized and controlled but we still pay over 1/4 of our income to rent/utilities. Amazingly we have family help paying for childcare otherwise it would cost us more then a make... we save nothing, but also have no student debt anymore and do an ok job with paying off credit cards. I should be more careful and wise with money.

We make more than the median for our town but still feel the strain of keeping costs in check. We did buy a house that felt like a bit of a stretch (by still well within what online calculators say we could afford), in the hopes of never having to move again. And there are always expensive coming up with the house- some expected, like getting new windows ($$$$) and some not expected. But at the end of the day we can pay for everything we need and most of what we want. DH makes enough money but the hours he needs to work for it are intense.

As someone above pointed out, we are in a very expensive stage of our lives- we just bought a house a year and a half ago that we knew needed a fair amount of work, so we are still paying for some big stuff with it; our kids are young and both will be in preschool next year. At the same time, we don’t currently have anything major we are specifically saving up for since we just bought the house.

So yeah we are doing fine but it never feels like enough.

@babypugs: I’ve been following along on this thread with great interest. I looked up our median, and depending on whether you choose our metro area or our town, we are somewhere between 2-2.5X the median. We feel comfortable, but conscious. We rent and feel we can’t afford to buy, but probably could if we stretched or sacrificed what we want in a home we own. We can afford an expensive preschool and roughly the $1k we spend each month out of pocket on medical expenses, and we max out retirement but can’t save a ton more beyond that. Luckily we lived WELL below our means and saved aggressively when we were DINKs and before we both took pay cuts for quality of life reasons, so emergencies won’t put us in a bad spot. I thought @Anagram: made good points but am curious how you calculated what a family should be able to afford Home wise based on income?

Childcare is also an interesting situation in my town. Back when I had a kid in full time daycare, the cheapest daycare I could find on my side of town was $1950/month for one kid. This was 4 years ago, so I assume it's over 2k now. This includes nothing--not food or diapers or anything. The expensive places in town were $2300-$2400 a month and the Montessori school worked out to be most expensive since they also had limited hours. I bounced my first kiddo around town to a few places and never found what I would call a really great daycare, in spite of the high price tag. So even 2k a month was not buying me any kind of special amenities or care or more qualified teachers. When we had our second, we had to make changes, as 4K a month for less-than-stellar care didn't make sense. So instead we paid 4K a month for a full time nanny and part time preschool for my oldest, haha. So our solution wasn't cheaper, just better for us for that time period. When you combine the exorbitant childcare with the crazy housing, it's kind of a wonder anyone can afford to live here--and yet, people do. Our HS here is majority low income. I can only imaging most of them have lived here for decades and are in rent controlled apartments, affordable housing, or have parents who bought decades before when housing was more reasonable.

@Anagram: thanks! I hadn’t heard that before, so it’s helpful to hear. It’s odd because that’s the max budget we have set when looking for homes in our area, although we could be approved for much, much more, and would prefer not to be house poor, so would prefer to spend less. Yet everything in our budget is either super dated or zoned to really poorly rated schools, and we don’t know schools well enough to know whether the ratings are reflective of quality or not. Do you mind sharing what area you’re in? That sounds a lot like the NYC/ NJ areas we came from, which was a big driver for us accepting a job that moved us down here. Yet still it feels really tight down here too, especially when we look at buying.

We make well over the median income and have been living waaay below our means for years but up until the tax reform act we were barely breaking even every month after paying for full time childcare.

@DesertDreams88: this is an interesting point because I recently had my hours cut at work which was a significant pay cut and the first thing I did was switch to non-organic milk. It really adds up....

We make over 3x the median income for our county, but we live in a really weird county that is like 90% uber rural/agricultural (so we have like farm workers who make no money) and there's only 2 major cities in the county, one of which is a very rich little enclaves where people make sky high incomes, so I can't tell whether that number makes any sense.

We feel very comfortable at the moment. Granted, we're not making any extreme advances in savings or whatever, but its just the season we're in. We feel pretty lazy right now financially to be honest. We could be more aggressive about debt and savings, but with 2 toddlers, we just need some grace to get through the next few years.

DH and I were incredibly aggressive with living below our means and paying off debt before we had kids. At one point we had 2 full time jobs, a business, and DH was getting paid to get his MBA. We were living on 25% of our income, driving beater paid off cars, renting a dump, and extreme couponing while throwing 5-figure payments at our law school loans every month.

We have always budgeted and don't carry credit card debt. We didn't have car payments for a long time, although we decided to carry a small car note this time on our van because we got a very low interest rate and with a house, it just seemed better to keep more liquidity. We could be tightening up our spending and putting more towards our student loans, but sigh....Like we paid off my law school loans and more than half of DH's, but then we had kids and the fervor to spend/do nothing and throw all our spare cash at the loan like when we were childless just kinda went by the wayside. Call it lifestyle inflation, but we just needed to move out of our dumpy duplex and I wanted a nicer house with a yard for my kids, and I wanted a minivan and not a 14 year old tiny sedan to drag them around in.

So basically, we're very privileged in that we don't worry about being able to afford things every month, but we're not at the top of our game or anything. We recently decided to take a chunk of savings and put it towards DH's law school loans and we're hoping to get that and the car note cleared in the next few years.

@Foodnerd81: "having two kids in daycare- what’s the alternative if you don’t have family nearby and need both incomes?"

Honestly, I know a lot of women that quit their jobs and use WIC & Medicaid to get by. No judgement - most of them are my best friends. On a related note, for example, if it weren't for my in-laws babysitting, healthcare & daycare for 2 kids would eat my ENTIRE take-home paycheck and at that point I would CONSIDER quitting and using public assistance to get by for a couple years, and that's with a very stripped-down budget.

Retirement is more of an "optional", "luxury" expense in my head, but it is sad that it is out-of-reach for many people. I guess I'm lucky that it is "forced" on me with an 11.5% contribution to pension and 6.2% to Social Security.... total is 17.7% of DH & I income is retirement and while I know it is "sensible," it is a bit frustrating, especially since I don't trust either of those sources to be there in 30 years.

Our joint income is about $40k more than the median income in my area and we still feel like we are struggling. It was worse when we lived in the city, because on paper we seemed to be doing quite well, but in reality it was hard. Before we moved, we were paying nearly $500/week for two in daycare, which was 2x our mortgage every month. We lived in a modest house that we bought when costs were low after the recession and our payment was decent. We only had one car that was paid off. But we still struggled. That daycare payment made everything HARD. Like, to the point that we weren't sure we would be able to do another year of two in daycare and keep our savings intact.

We just moved to an area with a lower cost of living (however in the same median income metro area) and while our house payment is $200 more a month, our daycare costs were cut nearly in half. We now pay equal amounts on our mortgage and daycare every month and we were able to finance a second car with extra from our home sale. We should be able to pay that off with our tax return next year. We feel like we can breath now and it won't be such a struggle to make it, plus our oldest goes to kindergarten in August 2019.

We make well over the median for our area and live very comfortably. We max out of 401ks, have two in daycare, have additional savings, have college savings, take vacations, hire landscapers, pay for YMCA memberships and classes, etc. I know we are well off and we live well off. We were both fortunate - we're white and both come from middle/upper-middle class families. We lived in good communities for school and both went to college, partially paid for by our parents. We both have engineering degrees and make good money.

We make below the median for our area (but probably above overall since we live in a high CoL area). I wouldn't say we struggle but we definitely don't live with tons of extra's. We just completed a home project we've been saving for; but that means we won't be taking a "big" vacations. We own our home thanks to generous parents that help us; while we don't live a life of luxury by any meals, I know we're extremely blessed and have everything we need. We don't do a lot of extra's, but we're also not budgeting every last dollar.

We make well above the median salary for our area. We live pretty comfortably, can afford travel when want to (nothing crazy) and can splurge on stuff. We're both responsible with spending and debt and bought a house well within our means and put 20% down so our mortgage isn't terrible. The biggest bite to our budget is daycare, ouch!

@looch: I think one of the biggest problems in America is that we still like to pretend, as a society, that anyone can do anything and that those of us who do well did so solely based on our own merits and just trying "hard enough." We like to vilify poor people as haven chosen the path they are on and that if they "just tried harder" they would be better off.

I think, as a society, we need to acknowledge that some people truly have a leg up. If you're white. If you're male. If you're from a middle or higher class family. If your parents are still together. If you were able to afford college. All these things contribute to how well you will do as an adult, and we shouldn't discount them. I'm well off because I was born to a well-off family who provided for me and gave me every opportunity. Not to say I didn't also WORK for what I have, but I definitely had a leg up right from the beginning.

We're at about 2.5x the median for our area. We are definitely comfortable, but we have some expensive choices that cut in to that.

We also acknowledge that we are in the most expensive time of our lives (2 kids in FT daycare and in the first few years of our forever home which is requiring investments) so we cut ourselves some slack with our savings.

@Adira: Yep and yep. I grew up poor AF and knew my parents would never be able to help me with my education and I took out loans and worked 3 jobs to get myself through undergrad. DH grew up very very middle class. He realized when he was 14 his family wouldn't be able to afford to send him to the kind of colleges he wanted to go to and worked his tail off to get into a service academy where he was able to go to college "for free." We both went to law school on our own and have basically been supporting ourselves since we were 18.

We do fine now, but we are also painfully cognizant how much less financially secure we are over friends who had college paid for, or had weddings paid for, or who had cars or home downpayments provided for them. We also don't expect any kind of generational wealth to be provided to us in the form of inheritance on either side of our families, while I know tons of our friends will get a big chunk of something later in their lives (around the time their kids are going to college!)

Its frustrating and demoralizing sometimes, because we are so proud of where we are and how hard we've worked and continue to work, but it just isn't enough to overcome generational advantages. We feel very very blessed and happy, but I do feel bad when I think about my kids versus their cousins, who I know will inherit a lot of money later in life, or who will have college 100% paid for or whatever.