Yes, we did that, and it was a good strategy.
When we were young and first married, we saved very, very aggressively.
When our kids became teens (and no matter what you do, teens are more expensive compared to children), we figured we had the option of "letting up" a bit on the savings. We wanted to do some serious traveling, etc. while they were teens, thinking it would be the ideal time -- and it was. However, we found that we didn't have to slow down our saving (mostly because our house was paid off).
We had the same plan in terms of college: Because we had already saved early, we had the option of "slowing down" our savings during the years we're paying for college. However, that hasn't been necessary. Starting next fall, we're going to have two kids in college, but we still don't anticipate the need to "slow down".
Saving early with the idea that you can slow down later is a great plan.
+1 - Although we are only at the beginning of the teen phase. I will say that renting rooms from a couple with a ton of electronic gadgets that were going bankrupt at the beginning of our life journey really helped us decide not to have that happen to us.
"Smart Couples Finish Rich" by David Bach is my most dog eared, circled and raggedy old finance book. We started at -$20K of total law school debt in 1998. We're over $1M now at 44 with me staying home for over 6 years and only working part time for 6. DH also took about 6-9 months off/PT one year to take the Bar in a new state.
From David Bach's book....
"Over time money compounds. Over a lot of time money compounds dramatically." At a 4% rate of return,starting at age 25 to retire at 65 with a milliion dollars you need to save about $1,000 a month. At a 7% rate of return you only have to save $400 a month.
DH and I started at 23 with the $1,000 a month conservative return savings philosophy. We're 20 years into the savings wheel and are saving more than $1,000/month now. We could afford to stop saving right now and never add another dime and retire at 65 just fine. Down shifting will occur when the oldest goes to college in 3 years. By then we should be at $1.3-$1.4M or so and will pay cash for college....By age 55 with compounding I think we'll realize we can luxuriously retire.
My thoughts...
- Start saving yesterday.
- Start investing today.
- Buy a house on a 15 year mortgage with no less than 20% down. You can afford this shorter payment period by purchasing less house than you qualify for (after 15 years everything starts to break on a house, so you don't want to try doing repairs while you're still paying a mortgage).
- Used cars, furniture (other than beds/couches) and last year's technology work just as well as new ones.
- start the kids college fund before you have kids (my one major regret is that I haven't prefunded these accounts enough). The idea that I need to keep working to pay for college is keeping me from feeling like we can FIRE.
Don't try to keep up with the Joneses - they are broke.