Strawberry cream cheese coffee cake this morning. I'll even serve coffee & tea. Although it's hot & muggy here, so let's also have mimosas!
This might be too personal for some. So how much money would you need to make (yearly salary) to be able to live "comfortably?" I'm sure our definitions of comfortable will vary. And I'm sure where we live will influence our answers.
Based on need to pay off lots of debt, I would say a $120,000 household income would allow us to quickly pay off bills and not have to worry about paying the bills. That is, if we continued to live our current lifestyle (same house, same types of vehicles). Then we could even afford to buy some toys in 5-10 years without going into anymore debt.
The chances of us having that income within the next 5 years is slim to none. We are both state employees. And not like fancy department heads or chancellors.
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11 comments:
Ummm, I'm taking some of this coffee cake with me to serve too the undergrads while they take their exam. Hope you don't mind.
I'm used to living cheap, but I do have some debt. I'll try to get by on $90,000 --- after taxes. I don't know how much I would need to earn pre-taxes. This would be living very comfortably. It would also allow me to put away lots of money in savings to support my old age.
I'm sure I'd need a lot more than you. I live in Joisey, see? Right now we make upwards of 100K per year and we don't do anything extravagant because we can't.
We have no bills anymore, except house, insurance and utilities. Two years ago, we paid off everything else with a home equity loan, so we have no car payments or credit cards. However, we do have two teenagers that require decent clothing, sports equipment, lots of food, etc.
If I wanted to have a decent vacation every year, plus be able to afford some extras above the basics, we would probably need to make at least 150 to 175K.
Yeah, the big thing for me is being able to pay down debt, pay the bills, sock away a decent amount into savings/investments and still having enough fun money for each month.
For our current lifestyle, I would add another $20k a year to live comfortably. To live the kind of lifestyle that we would both prefer to live, I would say $250k minimum per year would be good.
Mmm. That coffee cake and mimosas sounds deeeeeelish! Yum!
I'm not sure how to answer this question. Because of the fact that I'm single with no kids, and I live in an apartment (I would want a nicer one if I had more money) I guess at this point in my life I would be comfortable with $50K. I don't have any huge amount of debt-- only 1 credit card, no student loans (college drop-out), no mortgage, etc. $50K would be a dream to me, I make nowhere near that now.
I remember a time when I thought I would be happy making $30k. Ha!
The sad thing is that the more you make, the more you spend.
I have seen bigger families happy on a household salary that is less than ours. And to be honest, we could be fine with our income, but because of poor choices made in the past, we could use more.
I could also see myself happy being very rich. I certainly married for love. If I ever had to do it again, I would probably go for money. :)
LOL @ Boo.
Chris and I always tell each other to marry for money next time. :-)
I agree, boo. We'd be perfectly happy on our income if we had no debt other than the house. It's our poor choices in the past that we are paying for now.
We can live quite happily on $40,000. That gives us more than we need assuming we are paying rent.
Many years of living on $12,000 (each) and paying tuition out of that have given us pretty frugal habits.
However, I want to live in Vancouver and buy a house. Therefore I need 500 million billion dollars.
Strawberry cream cheese coffee cake is my favorite! You can hold the mimosa, though. Or drink it - I don't care. I want coffee!
Anything under $100,000 would be too little. Anything over $1 million would be gravy.
Depends on what you mean by comfortable.
Syrenboy and I lived on 30k a year when I worked, and we were happy and sure there were lots of big things we wanted, we just picked and choosed what we needed. But we were happy.
When I started back to school we lived on 1/3 of that, and still no big things...hardly nothing at all...but we were happy, and I am sure he will tell you he never knew how hard it was to make sure everything was paid.
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