About six years ago, my husband and I had a fairly comfortable lifestyle. I worked full-time and my husband worked part-time as a graduate assistant. We had one child, and we had no credit card debt. We did have my student loan debt from graduate school, though it was less than $10,000. We budgeted and set aside money for yearly expenses such as home insurance and twice yearly expenses such as car insurance, as well as car repairs. My employer automatically withdrew 8% of my salary and deposited it in a retirement account.
Sounds good, right? We thought so. We thought we could afford vacations and a weekly outing to our favorite sushi restaurant at the tune of $50 a visit. After all, we were able to pay in cash.
In retrospect, we were misguided. We couldn’t afford our lifestyle. Here is why:
We didn’t have a big enough emergency fund. We did have an emergency fund of about 3 months of living expenses. In an era where “fewer than four of 10 American adults have an emergency fund to fall back on in the event of some financial disaster, according to a nationwide Bankrate.com poll” (Bankrate), we were doing good, but we stopped saving when we hit 3 months of saving. We should have kept saving until we reached 6 to 12 months, but we didn’t.
If we had, it is very likely that when we had two more kids back-to-back and I quit my job because daycare was going to eat up so much of my salary, we would have avoided racking up much of the credit card debt we are now trying to pay off. We would have had a large cushion, which, in retrospect, I would have taken over weekly sushi dinners any day.
We didn’t fund Roth IRAs. Yes, my employer automatically took 8% of my salary for retirement, for which I am very glad, but we didn’t save independently for our own retirement. We should have set aside an amount every month to contribute to our Roth IRAs. Just making a few simple changes to our lifestyle or our bills could have helped us find more ways to contribute to our retirement. We became complacent because my employer was deducting money for retirement.
We didn’t fund an educational savings account. We now have three kids and no money saved for college. Our oldest is almost eight, so college is only 10 years away. Our youngest two are much further away from college, but when they go, we will have to pay for both of them at once because they will be only one grade apart in school. We have a lot of catching up to do, as does most of the country. The New York Times reports, “The findings of a survey of 1,200 parents of children under age 18 . . .by the Gallup Organization and Sallie
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