We Make Too Much To Live This Frugal

Like, no matter how much that that you make these days the consensus among everyone is that you make too much money to be living as frugal as my wife and I. We make 16 thousand dollars a month. We have a three thousand dollar mortgage. We spend twenty five hundred dollars on childcare. We spend about 8 hundred dollars on groceries. But if you factor in other things that we need to get like diapers, that's like a thousand dollars a month. Our health insurance is like 600 dollars a month. Utilities is about 400 dollars a month. The gas and insurance for our car comes out to about 300 dollars a month. We tide 16 dollars a month. Then we usually have some other random expenses that come up throughout the month. And on average it's about $1,000 a month. So all in our expenses are $9,900 a month. We are also self-employed so we automatically have $4,000 get taken out and invested. That's separate from that. We have to pay more taxes than what normally people would pay on a W2. And so our taxes on that $16,000 is $4,500 a month. Means that we make $16,000 a month. But after just covering our basic necessities, we have sixteen hundred dollars left that we can spend on our lifestyle. That's a family that has no auto loans, no credit card debt, no student loans. Like we have no debt other than our mortgage. Now, while we're super grateful to be in the position that we're in, I feel like our generation was promised a very different situation. Like, at this income level, I think that there's expectations that we would be balling at this point. Not only that, that expectation creates conflict in our marriage when one of us feels like we need to restrict our spending in order for us to live within our means. And so what my wife and I are starting to do is just everyday running down the things that we do feel grateful for in our life. That way, we can focus on appreciating what we do have instead of aspiring to have what we don't, which really would just lead us into a temptation to live outside our means and probably take on more financial stress.