We don’t eat much meat. We also buy a lot of bulk dry foods like beans, rice, pasta, and lentils. There were four grocery stores near our house, and we compared prices. One was an ethnic grocery store and another was No Frills, which tended to have lower prices on produce. We like stews so those are usually filling, flavorful, and cheap. My figure also doesn’t include non-edibles such as TP. I’m also assuming that your going out meals were under the “eating out” line item, so I didn’t include eating out in the $200 figure. Granted, we didn’t eat out much either, because of the pandemic.
Maybe consider staying home for Sunday breakfast? Unless you’re going out for very fancy breakfast food, many yummy breakfast foods are quite easy and cheap to make.
I think even if you could shave a couple hundred per month off your food budget, that could help.
Yeah, the breakfast out thing has kind of run it's course anyways. The COVID numbers in our area are really bad, so I think we're going to avoid crowded restaurants for a little while again. We don't do much take-out. Pizza or Chinese food here and there with our other friends who have kids when we're all too tired to cook.
We eat meat with pretty much every dinner, and then we have those leftovers for lunch the next day. That is something that we can work on, but it will be a gradual change. We've talked about doing cheaper lunches like sandwiches, but leftovers are so yummy.
The two immediate areas where you can save a ton are merchandise and food.
It seems like you might have fallen into the practice of setting aside some money for retirement (a good bit which is great!) and then just spend the rest on whatever you want in the moment. $800/month in food costs for two adults and a toddler is huge. Consider: Is there food waste? Are you buying items that spoil before being used? Are you eating meat every day? Are you planning a shopping list and following it? (an easy way to stick to it is using grocery pickup or delivery) Are you shopping at Whole Foods or other especially high priced shops? Buying lots of prepared foods? When my child was young I read the advice to have a weekly meal plan...the same 7 basic meals every week. So Tuesday could be chicken, Wednesday pasta, etc. Overspending on food is almost always due to under planning.
Thanks for stopping in with the advice! We honestly haven't really thought about saving or spending much recently. We just put the max into our work 401ks and then every few months when I go to pay my quarterly taxes I say holy crap we have too much cash in our account and I move a bunch into Vanguard. It's not a scientific method by any means.
As far as food goes, we have a two-week meal rotation that we follow pretty closely. We go to the grocery store once a week for it and costco maybe once or twice a month for a handful of items. We stick to getting what we need off the grocery list, so impulse buys don't make it into the cart. We're pretty good about eating through our leftovers and shop at our local Hannafords, not at a fancy grocery store like Whole Foods. We get organic milk for the kiddo but that's about it. I think it's the meat and we're not great about stocking up during sales or anything. We get prepackaged granola bars and bags of popcorn and goldfish from costco, but nothing too crazy. Hmm we do spend about $20/month on dried mango. Lol. Groceries are another area we'll have to examine a bit more closely.
For purchasing things other than food, my best step was a 30 day list on the fridge. If anyone in the family wanted something other than a necessity it would be put on the 30 day list and reconsidered after that. It was amazing how often desire declined in 30 days. This is particularly key for clothing. I stopped in Target recently and saw shopping carts full of holiday decor and holiday clothing that will only be used for the next few weeks. With stores like Target I usually order online and pickup in the parking lot (with the app so they can see when you are arriving they usually have it out within 5 minutes). Saves a lot of time and money since I don't fall for their attractive displays. Start with your children early---"we don't but something we don't need just because we see it in the store; we can think about it at home..."
I like this 30-day list idea! We might try some form of that. We don't go into stores too often to shop, so it's more a matter of staying off amazon. I love comparing products, and the convenience of having it shipped to your house in a day or two is dangerous.
When I was small my sister and I (two years apart) shared a bedroom and the 3rd bedroom in the house was our playroom. I think that worked much better than us each having our own bedroom.
The kids will definitely share a room until they're seven or eight or so. Luckily it's a larger room, so we can shift more toys into there. We're getting a bookshelf/storage unit next week that will help to reorganize in there. We're going to have a boy and a girl, so eventually they'll have their own rooms. The third bedroom is also the office/guest room so we don't have space for them to have their own rooms. My husband could work out of our bedroom if he had to, but that would kind of mess up our sleep routines as sometimes he works early or late.
In your initial post it sounds like you want your husband to quit working, but he doesn't want to. I would not urge anyone to quit who isn't ready---whatever their reasons are. His reason may be that he doesn't want to be home full time with two young children. That is a fine choice...as is choosing to be home with them. It's great that you are in a financial situation where you have options.
I'd love for him to be home. Our nanny is great, but I'd rather one of us be there raising the kids. I can't do it full-time myself. I need time away. He's going to use some of his paternity leave to essentially work 3-4 days a week for a couple months and if it goes well, see if he can get his company on board with that schedule permanently.
Where can I find a $200K PT job opportunity?
Holy crap, right? I never imagined I'd make this much money. Full-time positions with benefits pay around 150k in my field. I went into private practice and cannot believe the difference in pay.
We REALLY enjoy our frugal lifestyle though, and our quality of life has only improved as we've cut our costs and focused primarily on living really healthy lifestyles.
Our life feels more luxurious than it ever had because we've gotten so good at this. So it doesn't take discipline or hardship for us, our lifestyle is pretty amazing.
Try to approach this not from a place of "cutting back" but from a position of recognizing that your best life probably costs less than your current life.
Yes, I don't think the changes are going to stick if we feel like we're cutting back or depriving ourselves. When we switched from motorcycles and dirt biking to mountain biking some years back, it was a huge savings and it was more fun and healthier. Hopefully we can adjust our mindset and make some other changes that don't feel like a punishment. Unfortunately, a brief delve into our expenses has shown that we spent thousands on parts for our mountain bikes this year. They are expensive machines to maintain!
Potpourri:
If 1/2 of the couple REs before reaching FI, consider how difficult it would or would not be for them to reenter the workforce and support the family when evaluating your term life insurance needs for the remaining worker.
That's definitely something that gives us pause. My husband would feel a lot better if we were both closer to being able to fire before he cuts back. I also work in private practice and can't get STD or LTD, so that's a consideration when we think about losing his income. His is not an easy field to reenter after a long hiatus.
Potpourri:
You mentioned wanting more space for visitors when the children are older. Rhetorically, why not wait til they actually are older and see how you feel plus save more in the interim?
Perhaps relatedly, consider how much of a desire for more space and a parent home full time could be temporary nesting thinking. I'm not knowledgeable in this area.
Even if "nesting" is actually bullcrap, you mention mental energy reserves running low. Even if you spend high $ (groceries etc) for the next few years to get through it, that's much less of a commitment than a new big house might be. Said another way, solving a (hopefully) temporary problem with temporary solutions (it takes zero time to later adjust your grocery budget if you wake up five years from now with recharged emotional batteries) makes more sense than solving them with permanent or at least high friction solutions. And don't worry too much if you're not frugal for a few of your most exhausting years.
Oh nesting. I've definitely considered that. However, the desires for a larger home and for my husband to stay home have been there since our first was born, so I don't think it's just a hormonal pregnancy-driven mindset. But, good points about choosing temporary vs permanent solutions to problems that may just be temporary. I think the space issue will be a problem until the kids are out of the house though. That's a long time to feel squished and cluttered. Also, I'd like more space for visitors starting asap. That's been a pain since one of our bedrooms became a nursery and the other a guest room/office a couple years ago.
Potpourri:
A note that withdrawing 4% gives a range of outcomes historically. Consider how you'd feel in this scenario if we had a three year recession, since even a good plan can suck if you're stressed the whole time. But also, your line about the stache not increasing while withdrawing 4% is actually fairly pessimistic if you have those actual expenses, since I believe it's something like a 50/50 shot historically to grow up 2x the size over 30 years even without contributions.
If you do actually do this it may make sense to still contribute to tax advantaged accounts while withdrawing from taxable. Effectively trading them and possibly getting to use saver or child credits your income has historically been to high to get in the past.
We're about due for a recession or market correction, right? My husband is really hoping for a recession so that we can keep working and saving for the next few years and then have the economy take off when he goes to fire. It would be neat to see our savings continue to grow while withdrawing from them. That happened when we took a year off and traveled. Spend something like 40k traveling and came home with more in our bank accounts than when we started. That was weird.
Maybe I'm just a weirdo but I think buying stuff takes more mental bandwidth than not buying stuff. I hate going to the store and I also hate shopping on Amazon because there are too many choices and I get overwhelmed. Then you have to bring the thing home and get rid of the boxes and find a place to put it and then keep it clean and in good working order or perhaps move it around to clean the counters or the floor, or to get other things out of the cupboard, and then move it if you move. I'm exhausted just typing all that out. I find my life much easier now that I have fewer things.
There's definitely truth to what you say, but I also really like buying stuff when we "need" it. It's like checking off a to-do and getting something taken care of that has to be done.
Suggestions:
Just pay off that student loan, its $1000 bucks and it will free up some headspace from dealing with it. You actually could take some of your cash cushion and pay off the cars too- I know the interest is low on them but cash earns nothing and you will have two fewer obligations every month to keep track of. Cancel youtube, peloton, and your other subscriptions. Give your house a good decluttering. Put a temporary moratorium on buying things unless something important breaks. Remember that nanny/daycare goes away if your husband FIREs, so it won't take cutting that much of your other spending if he really wants to quit his job-maybe you go out to eat a little less often but it's no fun to go to a restaurant with small kids anyway.
The payments are automated for the car loan and student loan, so they're no biggie in terms of mental energy. With the student loan, if I ever go back to work FT it will just be forgiven so I've let it ride since cutting down to part-time.
The main living area of our house isn't too cluttered, though we are going to go through some of our daughter's toys again. She has been gifted a lot of small toys. What we've kept, she mostly plays with. Nothing in particular takes up a lot of space but we could get rid of a few things here and there. We donated a few things a couple weeks ago and it helped the play area a bit. We've also gotten my parents on board with gifting her stuff other than toys. They did new curtains and a bookshelf for Christmas, which is great because it's stuff we actually need.
It's the attic, sheds, and "garage" storage (I say garage, but it's not) that need decluttering and are a constant work in progress. Unfortunately, that's more of my husband's domain. In that it's a lot of his stuff that takes up the space, our it's our sports equipment/baby stuff but it's intermingled with all of his things. So we've got to do the decluttering together and that's a bit stressful for him. I love getting rid of things. He is more of a saver of things. We've donated a bunch of stuff in recent years, though. Which makes me worried that's what is left is truly stuff that we use and can't get rid of. So we might be able to stack it a bit better, but the space might be pretty optimally used already.
