Could I imagine how people would be set up to do this in my area? Yes, easily.
A large mortgage for a "prestigious" address in a good (read absolute best, by whatever standard) school district
Two leased vehicles, plus a third for weekend fun. At least one, and possibly all 3, are a giant truck.
Two kids, with their day care and after-school activities
Season tickets / club membership / professional development
travelling based on the school schedule, which is always surge priced
Private school, even though you spent to be in an amazing school district
Saving up for a big name school, maybe your alma mater. Extra prep and activities to increase chances for said school
Dining at the latest fancy place. There always seems to be more.
My area is the kind of striving area where the after Christmas sale starts two days before Christmas. (I'm not kidding) If you want a hot Halloween costume for your kid, you better have shopped in September.
It also is one of the few places in Houston with trees. Lots of trees. So, it was the closest thing to Ireland that we could find. And, fortunately, enough people who do not strive in the ways above for us to have found a lot of friends. Even if not quite Mustachian, they boggle at the externally-driven consumption that goes on.
I've never understood why so many parents who are genuinely smart and hard-working, whose positive traits got them in a position of wealth, are so obsessed with putting their kids into private schools so that the kids can be in 'elite' company, forgetting that none of it was required for the parents to achieve their riches in the first place. What does a private school give you that an elite public/gifted school wouldn't? I know that at a private school all the kids' parents will be rich, but that isn't going to make your kid a better student, or a better person. And if you really think networking is that important, (1) you have your own networks to give your kids; (2) it's trivially easy to network at university if you had good academic and social experiences in your youth, none of which require a private education.
This isn't quite your question. I'm not a parent but this is how the thinking goes for me. I'm a child of two 1975 college graduates of a university ranked around 100th in the country. They're millionaire next door types. I grew up in a small farm town in flyover country. There was no such thing as gifted public schools around here.
I never met my HS guidance counselor. That was for the best since he was there because he was a sports coach. His job was to help troubled kids graduate not talk to the smart kids. My parents gave me the best advice they had but it was 30 years out of date. No one in their network had an advanced degree.
I stopped being challenged academically by my sophomore year of high school (2005) because I'd taken the hardest senior classes offered. None of my friends took more than 1 AP class so I didn't either, though I did take 3 AP tests. The school offered 3 AP classes total. I didn't apply to Ivy schools because you had to write a couple hundred word essay, but really because I was intimidated. I applied for three in-state universities and was, in hindsight, very lucky that one of them was a top 20 university in the world. I only knew that it was a "good" school. I entered college completely under the impression that your college or major or GPA didn't matter. There wasn't
really an internet to correct my outdated understandings at the time.
It was hard to fit in surrounded by kids who'd already done calc 3 and organic chemistry and passed 10 AP tests. Who'd picked specific programs to get into specific careers and spent the first semester applying to wall street and big tech internships. My high school chemistry class was taught by the gym teacher. I was vaguely aware of wall street.
I never got learn more than "smart kid goes to good school" when, in hindsight, I would have been much better off at a school on the other side of the student body size spectrum. While I made plenty of friends and networked, my lifelong friends are all from high school. The one exception is the other guy at college from a background like mine.
It's easy for me to imagine how things might've been easier or better if I went to private school because I saw it first hand. Friends who were paid more upon graduation in 2011 than I make now, who understood that setting a high water mark has lifelong career dividends in a way I never did. Who knew, in high school, the path from investment banking to top MBA at 27 to xyz.
It's easy to forget there's downsides I don't know about and that I'm only seeing the success stories. I'm mindful that the biggest lesson from all the above is that every cohort is different - my knowledge is already significantly out of date. For now I think public school, with private tuition invested instead, and a lot of high school exposure to how the adult world works makes the most sense. It's also easy for me to understand why parents would trust a well-regarded private school if strong public/gifted isn't an option. I don't know why you'd pick private over the latter if they exist, but it's nothing I've ever been exposed to. I do know that many people in my shoes would simply equate
their public experience to
any public experience, observe their college peers, and conclude that private is better. Despite selection bias and that experience being 15+ years out of date. Thank God for the internet which will help me research things when the time comes.
