Hi! I've been reading MMM for a year or so and never registered for whatever reason.
Quick background: I live in Wichita, KS with my wife, dog, and two cats. I'm a data scientist, work from home and my wife is a resident physician (psychiatry). We don't have kids, but will be starting that in a year or so.
I've always been fairly frugal, with a few glaring exceptions. I haven't paid anyone to cut my hair in at least 3 years, I cook almost every meal, I always try to have a home gym. I do all my own auto maintenance and I build as much of my own furniture as I can. Her car is a 2000 Honda Civic she got for free from her grandmother, which we've spent about $20 on in 5 years (broken doorhandle). My car is a 1999 Subaru Outback which I bought for $1,000 with a blown head gasket, fixed/refurbished for about $1,000 and have spent nothing on it since except for tires. My phone (Nexus 6) is from 2014 and my main laptop is from 2008 (Thinkpad x200). We produce one trash can's worth of waste in a year. No cable, I garden, I drive less than 5,000 miles a year (bicycle year round), all that MMM stuff.
Now for the bad stuff: I fell into the reddit-centric trap of justifying "BIFL" (buy-it-for-life) goods which are hardly ever BIFL. In the past 5 years, I've spent:
- $390 for 2 pairs of raw denim (I later sold the $220 pair for ~$200)
- $120 for a mechanical keyboard
- $200 for headphones (later sold on craigslist)
- $120 for earbuds (sold on eBay)
- $600 for a fancy new Dell laptop (sold)
- $400 on Canadian boots, presumably assembled by a grisled old cobbler in a BC cabin
- $180 on a Vitamix blender
- $500 on stereo equipment for the whole house
I could go on, but you get the idea. Some of these are embarrassing (the /r/headphones people
really roped me in, dammit) but I still like my Vitamix, which I got refurbished, and ghastily expensive boots. I use the Vitamix once or twice a day to make meal replacement protein shakes that cost less than $0.90 and I've owned shitty blenders before that don't last 100 duty cycles. I hope the boots last the rest of my life and, if they don't, at least I learned a valuable lesson. My wife and I also have a high-end restaurant habit we have to kick. There were months we spent over $500 on restaurants.
These spending habits aren't anywhere close to as bad as those as my friends and my wife's coworkers. But they are embarrassing because I still have student loan debt and my savings rate, up until recently, has been very low. But I've cured myself of all this stuff now, my wife and I have a nice 'stashe growing, and life is better now.
Going Forward:My wife and I are looking to be FI in about 7-8 years (age 38), which should be no sweat as our income now is ~$135,000 and she's still in residency. I don't make the mistake of counting my chickens before they hatch, but she's gotten a few job offers in the $250,000 range and her attendings agree that that's roughly what she can expect to make. I'm playing around with the idea of stopping my career even sooner (like 34-35) and working on side hustles, managing our money, and raising our kids.
Last year, if you don't count student loan payments (which should be gone in <3 years), and rent (buying a house very soon) we spent $28,000 without even trying to be frugal. This year I hope to get below $20,000. We're very lucky that she has a generous, wealthy mother (who is amazingly mustachian herself) who in the past 5 years has taken us to NYC annually for Broadway shows, Park City, UT for annual week-long skiing trips and to London, France, and the Grand Canyon. So we never feel the need to travel and we have an amazing life. We do go camping a lot.
So anyway, that's my story. Great to be here! And if you're in Wichita, let me know!