Hello guys,
I've been following the Mr Money Mustache blog & forum and other similar blogs for a while now and decided to share my story. And numbers of course :)
Life situation: I'm a woman living in Belgium, living together with my boyfriend in a city, we're 30-32 years old right now, no children yet. We changed careers a couple of years ago and are now, after hard work, making a decent living and more than that, which is nice. We like our current jobs but would in the future probably rather work part time (80%).
We now live in a rather small apartment but are planning in a couple of years (2 to 4 let's say) to definitely move to something bigger.
Wages: about 2200-2300/month each, meal vouchers (100 €), health insurance paid by our employers, 1 company car + gas, 1 public transport pass, holidays pay and end of year bonus.
No other considerable income sources
Most important common expenses:
mortgage: 670
utilities (gas/electric/internet): +/- 100
groceries: an estimated 250
cleaner: 50-60
other stuff (insurances, furniture, common bought gifts, some dinners, ...): +/- 200
Personal expenses (clothes, lunch/dinner, going out, hobbies, ...) are honestly very difficult to estimate. It varies from month to month.
We don't have any debts except for the mortgage of course.
Savings: 120 k for the both of us. A big part of this is thanks to an inheritance.
Most of it is placed with Triodos, a bank investing only in sustainable projects which is very important for me.
Questions/reflection:
Of the two of us, I'm the one more involved in the financial stuff: reading about Mr Money Mustache, trying to optimize, etc. I feel this has worked quite well over the years and we've found a very agreable way of living that doesn't cost much. We try to do a lot ourselves: (baking bread, cooking most of the time, home improvements) which of course helps with that.
Ideally in a couple of years my life would look like this: have kids, living in a bigger apartment, work 80% both of us, enjoy a relaxed and sustainable life. For me the partial retirement option seems very nice and in my opinion also better suited to our country's context. I also want to have more free time to do other things than working in the future.
Some financial choices will have to be made though to get to the above situation: should we in the future rent out our current apartment or sell it? This is a definitely a hard choice to make because our opinions differ. Pro is that it would be an extra income source, contra is the time/effort spent to deal with tenants and possible hassles..
I'm also wondering whether both of us working 80% (or even less) with children will be financially possible. But seeing as we can easily save right now I guess it would be okay.