@Fishfindr:
Thanks for the vote of confidence.
There's no secret besides frugal living. My partner and I have one car. We both walk or bike to work. Without our mortgage, our net expenses are about $1k/mo each. We each contribute a share to joint expenses, e.g. house and car costs. In this way our expenses are merged, but shopping and other luxury items we are expected to fund ourselves. I have paid a larger share of our joint expenses in the past because my income has been disproportionately larger: each year we adjust our shares that we pay based on annual income.
We could downsize our house and car to produce additional liquid capital in a pinch.
@SKL-HOU:
I don't think you have the complete picture. My expenses are part of a larger picture. That much is true, but my partner is not carrying any of my load for me, which seems to be the implications. Our shared expenses are about $10k, which we split between us: see my reply to Fishfindr, above. That means my expenses are $12k: $5k of this goes to shared expenses such as house and car maintenance. The remainder is my own spending. As I said to Fishfindr, we could downsize our housing and car expenses if needed, reducing our costs further.
If one must consider my total annual costs independent of my partner, they would be something like $17k, but if I weren't with my partner, I wouldn't have many of the costs I currently have. Consequently, that $17k doesn't represent how I would live without my partner.
