How to save a million dollars

My company is called Live Beneath Your Means but it might as well be called Live Without Dependents … ’cause that’s the easiest way to do it. I don’t even mean just the two-legged kind. I saw a friend over Thanksgiving who is an owner and manager of a whole bunch of veterinary clinics across the country. I don’t know how well he does exactly, but he seemed to have a lot of free time and flexibility as to when we could meet up 🤔. Also, he wore a hoodie exclusively. You know what that means.

If you’ve achieved this state of living without dependents, congratulations! You’re on your way to financial stability and prosperity. For everyone else … well, I guess you have to keep reading.

I was chatting with my mother-in-law about her upcoming winter sojourn to Sante Fe—*gives pointed why do WE stay in town? look to husband*—and she was ruminating on the cost of a coffee and muffin in that snowbird town. I’ll be there for 43 days and if you figure $10 a day every morning … that adds up. My mother-in-law grew up as the youngest daughter of a Wisconsin dairy farmer so you know she’s all about LBYM.

Still, the lady is 80 and if you ask me, after everything she’s taken care of in her life, if she wants to eat a (“delicious”) muffin morning, noon, and night, she should just do it … and add a thick slab of butter while she’s at it. Sure, $430 sounds like a lot of money for, basically, flavored hot water and flour + sugar (or a hat), but I guarantee you, that $430 will give her more joy and pleasure that almost every dollar I spend on … her grandkids.

I saw another one of my friends recently and as we were discussing the neverending topic of work-life balance, she reminisced about our phone conversation a few years previously when she was pregnant with her younger son. Apparently, after I had congratulated her, I said I hate to tell you, but the next couple of years are going to suck.

I was a little taken aback. I mean, don’t get me wrong, that definitely sounds like something I would have thought, but I was a little surprised I had given voice to it (every person I have ever had a watercooler conversation with: I am not surprised).

There’s a good chance my mother-in-law spent more time thinking about the financial implications of her breakfast choices than what a lot of people spend thinking about having kids … or a dog … or both. To put it bluntly (surprise, surprise), nothing is going to impact your financial life more than bringing a whole bunch of other lives in to it.

Let me tell you a cautionary tale.

My third is a classic youngest child, the life of the party. More precisely, a surprise party. We found out we were having him right as we were looking for a house to buy in Madison. Even before he took his first lusty breath, I estimate he had cost us approximately a quarter of a million dollars given the price difference between houses that did and did not have separate quarters for a live-in nanny. That’s a lot of muffins.

And the bill’s pretty much just grown from there (I say “bill”, but really, let’s all admit—this is just bad debt on the family balance sheet). Forget breakfast for 43 days, imagine tallying up the costs of some variation of this every day for 21 years:

If you’re not laughing, you’re crying.

I am sure there is some evolutionary, part-of-the-human-condition, blah-blah-blah reason we do not think about the true soup-to-nuts cost of sending our DNA into the future.

But don’t say I didn’t warn you.