As mentioned in the previous post, I said that “we lived within our means”. But what does this really include?

For starters, we didn’t buy every single thing that was available. We had what we needed, and some of what we wanted. But we did do without – but only from a lifestyle perspective. We had Amazon Prime which included Amazon Video. But that was it. We didn’t have any of the other streaming services like Disney+, Netflix, Hulu, HBOMax, etc. (not that there is anything wrong with any of them). But between our DVD and [tiny] Blu-ray collection, what is available on TV (live and DVR’ed) and on-demand, and Prime, we had more than enough to watch. Plus we didn’t want our lives to become completely sedentary in front of the TV either. And for most of our lives, the largest TV we had was only 37″ (a bigger TV would have been another expense, plus we would have needed to get a new entertainment unit to hold it – and that… cost money). And I had a PS3 when the PS5 was being introduced.

Then there were the other aspects of daily life, like going out to eat. We really didn’t, maybe 6 times a month – which included getting a $7 large sausage pizza (it was only $5 for over a decade too) from the local pizzeria every Wednesday. Even the monthly night with friends to the local brew pub was on half-price burger night. After my wife retired, she started expanding her cooking repertoire and got a little more exotic (food wise…), and we weren’t eating hot dogs every week either. I did most of the cooking before she retired, but even that was a little limited in scope.

Our cars? Used. At least after I turned 24ish. And that was nearly a dozen cars in the last almost-three-decades. We had three at one time – each of our commuter cars, and our “weekend car”. Again, all used. Then we started carpooling (we only worked a mile apart from each other, so why drive two cars so much that close to each other) and got rid of one of the three cars – the “weekend car”. Now, we still have just the two. And a motorcycle. That was bought used too – and is being sold next spring since I don’t ride it very much anymore, and now it has just become an insurance payment.

Our house? More than enough for us. But rather than upgrade and move, which we could have done, we chose to stay put and pay it off. If all goes well, we’ll pay off anything outstanding on our current house, and pay off our retirement home, and that will be that. No housing debt in retirement.

There are arguments for and against home ownership, especially for those later in life. But I am in the “for” school. Even with some annual maintenance and upkeep, it would be far less than any rent would be. Of course a big enough expense could be a potential issue, but regular maintenance and upkeep helps prevent that. Plus rent constantly increases. No mortgage payment never increases. And even if it tripled, well… it’s still zero.

Because we had enough space in our house, we are able to sometimes buy in bulk / multiple items when things were on sale. This allowed us to save money when shopping (and we didn’t even belong to a club because when we got free six-month trial memberships, we only went two or three times and a paid membership for the little that we used it would not have been cost effective based on what we bought, how much, and how we bought {sales, coupons, etc.}).

And circling back to work, I made lunch for my wife and I each morning too. This saved a lot each day as well. We planned to go out to lunch once in a while, but that was it. Plus there was never that struggle of “where am I / are we [with coworkers] going to eat today?” Eventually, we even got to the point of buying our own turkey to roast, slicing it, and eating that on sandwiches for lunch. A home cooked turkey not-the-week-before-Thanksgiving is less than $2 per pound. Sliced from the deli? $6.99, $7.99, or more. I’d roast it, slice it, freeze some of it, and the rest was near-term lunches. We would sometimes get a presliced ham from the meat department, or splurge on roast beef from the deli, but three quarters of our lunches were probably turkey.

At some point I started baking bread. Not for the cost savings, but for the enjoyment of it, and the taste. And I also knew what was in my bread, including the lack of preservatives. This is the bread we ate for lunch. Not only was it good, it was cost effective too.

These are just some of the ways that WE saved money, and allowed me to maximize my 401k contribution – by reducing our monthly expenses.