Well, after a week of up/down – but, mainly DOWN – blog time, we have our new site up and running! Please let me know what you think?!
Thanks for your patience … FINALLY, here is today’s post 🙂
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Oh, if only we earned three times more than we do today …
… then we could tithe, save, and meet our financial goals. Life would be SO much easier 😉
Rick puts it simply:
Saving half your income is far easier if you make $180,000/year than if you are making $61,000/year.
I’m not so sure: there is a cruel financial joke; it goes something like this:
– earn $50k, spend $50k?
– earn $150k, spend $150k!
The good/bad habits are made when you ARE earning $61k per year … at least, in my experience. And, in Scott’s (who is an Ultra High Income doctor) experience, as well:
Even if we brought home a third of what we do now, we would simply have a smaller mortgage, lower taxes, lower resulting insurance and lower costs in several other areas and we would be saving a large percentage of our salaries as well. This is were delayed gratification comes into play
The reason WHY Scott can save half his income, is because he started off with low expectations, and kept them in check, even as his income grew and grew and grew:
I guess people think that i’m super frugal and living a little on the miserly side, since we are saving half of our net income per month. But, the thing is, we net 15-16k per month now. If I can’t find some kind of peace and enjoyment on half of that after growing up poor, then I have serious problems!
Peace and enjoyment is found in frugal living for some, and living ‘large’ for others; what matters most, I believe, is that you live within whatever means you decide to put together 🙂
I think he meant that your standard of living would not be a good as a person making $180K and saving.
In order words, he can live off of half his income and still be comfortable to have leisure activities. Unlike living off of $30K is almost poverty
I am back office support for a wealth managment & Estate Planning firm, and I can tell you that this post is 100% accurate.
We have clients that come to us clearing $500K to a Mil a year, but they are spending the SAME AMOUNT IF NOT MORE!
@ My Journey – Send them MY way … I’ve got some swamp land to sell ’em 😉
the new site is nice, Its Clean, Simple and easy to navigate. Thats just the way all sites should attempt to be.
I am confident that I would do just fine on earning 60k per year and would still amass a decent sum of wealth in 10-15yrs with smart investing.
If some think 30k is poverty level, just wait until you start traveling overseas and see what ‘poverty’ really means.
You’ll come back kissing the ground in the U.S. and that 30k per year will sound nice. 😉
The issue is not how much you earn or how much you can save.
I think the biggest issues with people these days is they all want to get rich the fastest way without doing any work.
@ Norm – I agree; you can even see it in my 7 Millionaires … In Training! ‘grand experiment’ (at 7m7y.com): through the application process, people dropped out at various stages as they began to see “this looks a bit like hard work” …
5% inspiration + 95% perspiration … all we can do in these blogs is help with the 5% bit 🙂
Adrian,
I was beginning to wonder what was going on with the site….BTW I seem to have trouble viewing it under IE 7.
Generalizing my quote a bit:
If you want to save then it is a lot easier to save a larger % of your income as you earn more.
The corollary is:
Having higher income doesn’t make you any more likely to desire savings.
Those may seem contradictory but they really are not- why should my money management automatically improve as my income rises?
Just look at Michael Jackson- apparently he died with $400 million in debt!
-Rick Francis
@ Rick – Thanks for your comments. Sorry you’re having trouble under IE7 … we have tested all three sites under both IE8 and Firefox, with no problems. The Sites are actually optimized for Firefox.