*Updated* Reader Case Study - House Hunting when SO was laid off.

[afuera]

Thanks everyone! I was off the forums for a few days since family was in town but here are details as requested!

• Hubs new job is not in O&G.  The company does asset integrity work on a contract basis for manufacturing sites.  Hubs will be working as a field engineer at different sites helping with their asset integrity issues.  This will be great experience for him, especially if he wants to work for a chemical manufacturing site in the future.
• Bennies- He will get a free (to him) HDHP with $500 seed money in an HSA-this is the exact same as my company.  The 401K is managed by Voya who I haven't heard of but they seem to have some vanguard funds so I'm not too worried.
• Salary is 85K which is ~10K more than he was making at his previous job before he was laid off. yayyyyy!

As far as a finances update:
Assets: 174K
$15K in online savings (E-fund)
$7K in Roth IRA (self)
$55K in my 401K (self)
59K Pension Balance (self)
$31K in bubs tIRA (Rolled his old 401K over to Vanguard).
$4K in HSA
$3K in Checking

We dropped our alcohol and restaurant spending by around 100 dollars but the biggest changes we made that allowed us to continue stashing were selling the Mercedes (which allowed us to drop comp. insurance) and moving to a new, smaller apartment (1 bedroom).
The challenge now will be to not let our baseline creep back up once hubs starts working and we have buttloads of extra cash again.

[nereo]

Glad to hear things are going much better for you and your SO.

The challenge now will be to not let our baseline creep back up once hubs starts working and we have buttloads of extra cash again.

Yup - that's the challenge.  Or, to look at it from an optimistic point of view, its much easier to keep your current line of spending than it is to reduce spending levels.  You've done the hard parts, now it's just avoiding lifestyle creep.
Personally, I'd look at your budget and make aggressive savings goals that will keep your spending in check.  Do that for a year or so and it gets ingrained.

[RelaxedGal]

RE: Project Fi: they now have Group Plans that should save you $5/month.

[afuera]

RE: Project Fi: they now have Group Plans that should save you $5/month.

oooh nice, I didn't know about that.  Score.

[Bracken_Joy]

Wow! Well done on the car and the apartment. Talk about making the hard changes you need to make! It's always so inspiring to see people follow through on case studies. Well done!

And congrats on your husband's new job!

[flan]

Hi afuera! You should start a journal now that you're not in a case study crisis! There are also less facepunches over in the Journals ;)

We are in VERY similar situations as you - Houston, 25/26, hubs in O&G, been together 7 years. We did buy a house but sort of regret it as it was a pre-MMM decision. We've got 2 cars as well (paid-off; 7 years old) since Houston really is a complete bane to navigate without cars.

Fantastic start & great progress so far!!

[piethief]

Congratulations!  Just saw this thread.

You are so young and have such a phenomenal household income (and really, budget is pretty outstanding too), if you don't creep up, you are going to be rich before you know it.

The biggest adjustment you may have to make is if you don't have children and plan to have them in the future.  Kids have a way of really modifying your budget.  (i.e., your "go out" budget becomes 0 for several years, but your clothes, toys, food budgets all go up.)

Have you thought about setting a goal of a specific $ amount per year to invest/save?  Say you want to increase your contributed principal of investments by 100K per year or whatever.  Then you can count it down each month.  Something like that may help you stay on track over the long haul.  Almost the reverse of paying off debt a-la Dave Ramsey.  (But for more badass people:)