@wanderinghopelessly So I’ll try to take this line by line as best I can.
Assume a monthly takehome of about 6.5k after retirement/college savings and taxes.
Yes this is about what my take home pay is.
A house that fits the above criteria in my area would need approx 2.6k to 3k/mo mortgage minimum (not even talking about downpayment)
This is where we get in a bit of trouble with our subjective definitions of the term “comfortable.” I didn’t realize you meant you needed to
own a house to be comfortable. We are perfectly comfortable renting our luxury 2 bedroom apartment for $1750/month. Would a house be nice? Sure, but I consider that a luxury. We are perfectly comfortable where we are now. Anything above that for us would be a luxury.
Another 600 for at least one car payment plus insurance for two cars
We buy our cars in cash, but even if we didn’t, there’s no way in hell we’d get one with a monthly payment that high. One of our cars we purchased for like $4k total lol
1500 for at least 1 kid in daycare
We don’t pay for daycare, but let’s assume we did, I’ll give you $2500/month for daycare for 2 kids, which would be $30k. Even then, that doesn’t put us anywhere close to needing an extra $115k in income.
200 for gas/tolls, 300 for utilities/internet,
This sounds about right.
1000 for groceries plus eating out for 4 and we're already capped.
We spend $800 on groceries + eating out but close enough.
No money for student loans, the vacations, Billy's baseball camp, Lisa's gymnastics,
Again, this is where we run into trouble with the subjective term “comfortable.” Student loans aside, Baseball camp and gymnastics are expensive activities. I consider those luxuries, not expenses that are needed to be comfortable, in my opinion. And then you have vacations. What exactly are these vacations? Are these expensive all inclusive resorts in Mexico? Or are they the really fun yet relatively cheap vacations we take with our family where we rent out an Airbnb in Broken Bow, OK? Again, our family is perfectly comfortable taking one of those every year.
your yearly health insurance deductible plus copay
We already budget for this. Insurance premium is $8k/yr and our max out of pocket is $7k (most years we don’t hit that though).
clothes for 4, extra savings in case you get laid off and have to look for 6mo, etc etc.
We have built up about 12 months worth of savings (not including retirement accounts, we have far more than that saved up for retirement), so we handle that part just fine.
That's in a city with moderate COL. For anywhere in California or NYC or Boston it really really wouldn't work.
Well the interesting part of this article is that it wasn’t referring just to HCOL cities, but rather, it mentioned the largest 100 cities in the US, which covers many MCOL and LCOL cities. If we’re talking strictly the HCOL cities you mentioned above, sure that’s understandable. But as far as the other cities on that list, no $230k is
FAR more than you need.
In case you were curious of our actual numbers, for our family of 4 our total expenses for the year are between $57k-$64k, depending on our medical expenses for the year, and that doesn’t include any savings.