[BRK]

Had a modest inner city property in a suburb called highgate in west australia. Sold for all the wrong reasons.. I wont even drive past it anymore given the rises in price of such land...
...

[dradernh]

Originally Posted by XutvJet

I really don't understand where this math is coming from. My wife and I don't spend $17k/yr or $1400/mo raising our kids. Yes, some months or years are more expensive, but overall, not $17/yr. Not even close. We'd still have the same cars and house if we didn't have kids. My health insurance would only be marginally cheaper.

Seeing that the median household income is around $78k year, and many households have 2 kids, it's hard for me to fathom folks making $120k or less a year are spending $17k/yr raising each child until 17 as this data suggests. I think weathly folks sending their kiddos to day long daycare and private schools are really skewing this number.

Yeah, because they weren't my kids, I'm in no position to respond with hard data.

The family I'm referencing had a stay-at-home mother who had had a successful outside sales career in tech and a father working in a very volatile industry with years of very high wages and years of much lower wages after over-50% pension give-backs. The kids went to public school in an expensive NH town well-known for its schools and high property taxes, they didn't go to $30K summer camps, and they weren't driving their own cars to school after becoming old enough to earn their drivers licenses.

If I had to guess, having lived close-by in the same town leads me to think it was the additional cost of a home and eighteen years of attendant property taxes in a town that they wouldn't have otherwise lived in that put a significant floor under the overall calculated cost of raising the kids.

I will say this: the parents are super-sharp people and would not have been making numbers up. When I chose to raise the subject, the number was one they'd already calculated for themselves.

FWIW, both kids ended up going to a flagship state university in another state. For them, it was never about Harvard, Princeton, Duke, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, and those schools, although I think the parents were prepared to support that if it was a proper fit for the kids.

[dradernh]

Originally Posted by BRK

Had a modest inner city property in a suburb called highgate in west australia. Sold for all the wrong reasons.. I wont even drive past it anymore given the rises in price of such land...
...

When living in Singapore in the late 1990s, I met several locals who were investing significant amounts in Perth homes and land.

If you know, has foreign direct investment had a significant effect on Western Australian home and land values, or has the change in values been more a matter of internal Australian factors?

[BRK]

In Perth, the level of investment from overseas sources would be best described as modest and generally confined to a few of the already expensive suburbs. Local price rises have been affected by mining and associated industry with attendant disposable income..

[flybigjet]

I saved up my per diem for three years and bought an Imola Red e46 M3 as a brand-new special order. I farkled it to hell and gone getting ready to take it to the track- Shark'd the motor, full suspension upgrade, exhaust, CSL replica wheels, tires, etc. It was turn-key ready. And then on top of that, I dropped serious coin into a full-on audio system and a bunch of electronic magic. It was one *Hell* of a weekender.

Of course, the track closed before I could ever get on it.

And then I got married. And with the new wife, I needed garage space so one of my cars had to go, and the M3 was the least practical by far.

Then I discovered that my wife *loved* to drive the car very..... *very* fast when I was out of town.

I figured sooner or later I'd get a call from a bailbondsman or the morgue, so I sold it to a buddy with all of the modifications I'd done to it as a package deal.

$26k. Out the door. With barely 10k miles on it.

Was it a life-altering financial decision? No.

But, do I regret it? Almost every single day.

I estimated that between the hit I took on buying high and selling low and all the parts I put on it, I was into a low six-figure loss.

That.... was a LOT of money in the late 2000's right as the recession was knocking the bottom out of my industry.

Fwiw, the my buddy still owns the car-- it lives in Ft. Meyers now and it's pretty much his most prized possession.

(Still wish I had that extra $100,000 though!)

And I never learned my lesson-- between modifying a bunch of bikes and cars since then (and the M2C now), I'm easily well into mid six figures in mods and toys.

If I could only go back and talk to myself in the early 2000's-- I'd tell myself to get rid of all my tools and never, EVER buy anything with wheels again!

R.

[dradernh]

Originally Posted by flybigjet

I saved up my per diem for three years and bought an Imola Red e46 M3 as a brand-new special order. I farkled it to hell and gone getting ready to take it to the track- Shark'd the motor, full suspension upgrade, exhaust, CSL replica wheels, tires, etc. It was turn-key ready. And then on top of that, I dropped serious coin into a full-on audio system and a bunch of electronic magic. It was one *Hell* of a weekender.

Of course, the track closed before I could ever get on it.

And then I got married. And with the new wife, I needed garage space so one of my cars had to go, and the M3 was the least practical by far.

I also quickly figured out that my wife *loved* to drive the car very..... *very* fast when I was out of town.

I figured sooner or later I'd get a call from a bailbondsman or the morgue, so I sold it to a buddy with all of the modifications I'd done to it as a package deal.

$26k. Out the door. With barely 10k miles on it.

Was it a life-altering financial decision? No.

But, do I regret it? Almost every single day.

I estimated that between the hit I took on buying high and selling low and all the parts I put on it, I was into a low six-figure hit.

That.... was a LOT of money in the late 2000's right as the recession was knocking the bottom out of my industry.

Fwiw, the my buddy still owns the car-- it lives in Ft. Meyers now and it's his most prized possession.

(Still wish I had that extra $100,000 though!)

R.

Thanks for sharing. Welcome to the club.

[bobowar135]

I spent $20000 AUD on an 11 year old BMW.

[SharpAndCunning]

Originally Posted by Alfisti

Two examples.

1) Legit story. Had a bet all lined up at 5 agencies in Australia, $2K each on Brawn GP after the first day of practice, was 88:1 to win the WCC. My balls shrank and i bailed. Near $900K down the drain.

2) Way too conservative. I've had access to near $1m at barely 2pc interest over the last 7 years and did fuck all with it, huge, huge mistake.

Reading this made me realize I am too poor to participate in this conversation.

[3.0L]

I loaned some money to a sibling...

[Alfisti]

Originally Posted by SharpAndCunning

Reading this made me realize I am too poor to participate in this conversation.

Nah my stuff was not real money. THe online gambling was before kids, two incomes, no mortgage.... not that kinda spare cash now! And my "access to $1m" was via a LOC so not free. Mind you it nearly was free at 1.7%!

[dradernh]

Originally Posted by 3.0L

I loaned some money to a sibling...

Your example brings up an unpleasant memory. It's not my worst financial decision (I noted that one earlier in the thread), but the relationship lost because of the loan was something I wish hadn't happened.

I lent $7,500 (this year's dollars) to an ex-wife that I was still close to so she could pay an attorney in a child custody battle. I could afford to lend it and to never see it again, which I didn't.

I'd heard these stories before from others who'd lent money to someone they were close to. Then, after the money's lent, for whatever reason the borrower can't pay it back in anything like a timely manner, and the relationship goes kaput. In each case, the lender's left and saying "I just want the relationship back." Too late.

I know the ex-wife was too embarrassed to talk to me about why she couldn't pay it back and that's why she no longer took my calls. By the time she could pay it back, she was still too embarrassed to make the call. The whole thing was just stupid. She ran into my (current) wife years later – thank god both have too much class to have raised the subject.

If I was asked to do that again, and the sum was similar in terms of my being able to afford to give it away, that's what I would do. "Here, do what you need to do. If you want to pay me back, that's fine, but do not worry about it! Our relationship is what's important to me."

I later learned my dad had made a loan like that to a close friend. The friend made sure everyone at the Celebration of Life for dad after his passing knew that had happened and how much both the gesture regarding repayment and the loan itself had meant to him. I wish I'd known about that circumstance before the ex-wife needed help, but dad came from a generation that didn't talk about a lot of things, and I'd forgotten what I'd already heard from friends whose loans didn't work out.

[DO444]

Originally Posted by overcoil

trusting a lawyer was probably the worst.

Yea, me as well.
Never trust anyone but especially never trust a lawyer. You have to talk to a million of them, consolidate the info you get and still be wary.

[DO444]

Originally Posted by CamasM3e93

1998 had 2k in my pocket to invest in a local dot-com startup. Narrowed it down to Drugstore.com and this online bookstore called Amazon. Took the income write off years later when drugstore went bankrupt.

In your defense, who reads?

[dradernh]

Originally Posted by DO444

In your defense, who reads?

Below are the books I've read in the last year or so that are awaiting donation to our local library. I learn a lot from books, much more than I do from other sources.

If anyone is interested, that's my confirmation Bible down there in the center left of the photo. I'm not really religious, but I've learned something from it, too.

[F32Fleet]

Originally Posted by dradernh

When I suggested to a friend in the mid-00s that raising a child in the upper middle class to age 18 cost $250K in after-tax dollars (a number I'd read in the WSJ a decade earlier), he looked me right in the eye and very quickly brought me up to speed. It wasn't a quarter of a million after-tax dollars any more, he said, it was one-third of a million dollars. Per child. After tax.

Mind you, that's to set the child up to win economically for the rest of his or her life – to be one of the 10%. After that, of course, it's up to the kid to make the grade.

This wasn't a family splashing-out in any visible way, and I didn't ask for a breakdown, but I found that to be a very sobering number. The wife and I were well beyond having kids by then (we chose not to have them decades before), but it did give us an appreciation for what parents wanting their kids to have - not the very best of everything by any means, but a fair shot at most of what our country has to offer - had to pay to make that happen.

Ditto

[F32Fleet]

Equinox circa 1995.. Level 4 from the top.

[RobotDoctor]

Loaning a "friend" a substantial amount of money to get them out of a sticky situation. I won't do that again.

[c1pher]

Originally Posted by DubaiRich

Got married to a bloodsucker; we divorced, and she got half!

Same story for me. Marriage only lasted longer due to two kids and the fact that I was gone a lot for the military. Once I was home all the time, things quickly unraveled. Took me close to ten years to dig out financially and just finally made my last alimony payment a couple months ago. My ex weaponized/ disassociated the kids so I have no relationship with them. Lost all but two friends (I guess not really my friends after all). But she’s a great person and everyone loves her. Amazing how someone can be two different people. Other than that my life is awesome.

I’ve moved on, remarried to my soulmate and we are getting ready to retire. Forgiveness is a real thing and it sets your soul, mind and heart free.