But I can see how people make the decision – there’s a lot of social pressure to move far away from everything and get a giant kid-hauler of some sort, and if you can’t ever give other people’s kids a ride even though they are often hauling yours, that’s a social capital problem too.

As for a two-door vehicle with children, I think itis more difficult with the car seats, from my perspective and experience. Trying to drop off children at school in the drop off lane is another difficulty if we had only a two door car because you can’t leave your car so either children or you will have to try to reach across the car to open the door. Finally, the door length of a two-door car is bigger so you need more room to try in parking spaces if you want to ensure your car door will not hit the car door of the person next to you.

Oh yeah, what do you do with that extra money that you used to put towards your mortgage? Why not a Roth IRA?

Some people want to seat 7 so that they can cart their kids friends along to places too, but I don’t feel that need strongly enough to get an expensive gas guzzler.

For the budget I start with take-home pay, assuming we’d still be putting the same amount toward retirement savings and our family health insurance would cost the same – unfortunately since we’re on my partner’s insurance, if he were out of work, our insurance costs would likely go up significantly. But since I can’t know how much, I just ignore it for planning purposes.

There’s also safety considerations – SUVs feel safer to people, even when they aren’t, and a lot of people go safety-crazy when they have a baby.

I know all the details. I even preach to friends and family about it. I’m not 100% there yet either. Thank you for your motivating comments. And those of others! It’s nice to know I’m not alone.

I used to plan a month in advance when I worked before. That way I only went to Costco once a month. Then I’d just pick up fresh veggies weekly.

I should try that freeze for a week or month. I know it’d be a long day but it’s nice to pop something out. Right now I freeze black beans for a month or two. I also have cut up and froze bell peppers. I should do that again to save some chopping time! Onions are OK to freeze also but they didn’t seem as flavorful as when fresh cut.

I would also be interested in that other book Nicole. Thanks! I think for the freezer the 2-3 servings would be perfect for us right now though.

I think it took us about 2-3 years to get out of initial debt of 40K. It took us a total of close to 6 years to pay off the mortgage (which is rather small compared to some of the other parts of the country). We don’t have IRA’s or 529. 401K is maxed out. Our emergency savings is close to 4-6 months of living expenses + some money in the HSA to cover for medical emergencies.

I was a bit skeptical about paying off the mortgage too. In fact I decided to try my hand at the stock market first. I go burnt pretty bad, pretty early in the game (in spite of investing in an index fund) but luckily the amount was small. That’s when I agreed with my husband to go after the mortgage. Our mortgage rate was also ~4.5%. After adjusting for tax benefits it would probably be close to 3%. But we decided that taking the guaranteed 3% and the big bonus peace of mind was better than a “possible” larger gain in other kinds of investment. To others that are more into investing and know what they are doing, that may be a better option. But for folks like us who are not good at investing, the guaranteed returns (both financial and psychological) is a much better option, in my opinion.

And I totally understand what you mean about waiting to be laid off. We first started expecting the layoffs about 3 years back. In these three years, I have gone from denial to acceptance to sometimes looking forward to the layoff and back to denial

Even though the work culture at my company is very bad, and it is extremely stressful, I don’t think my company is that much worse than any of the other companies out there. So, I am very ambivalent about looking forward to the layoff… we still are not at the financial stage in our life to make a permanent switch to a single income, yet. That means, I will have to look for another job, and that would be like jumping from frying pan to the fire. So for now, I am coasting along… trying to keep my job for as long as possible. We are at a stage in my project where the whole division will come under severe scrutiny sometime in the early part of next year – not sure if we can survive it. There are only so many times that you can wiggle out of messy situations….

Anyway, Good luck to you! A dark night is always followed by the day…. hopefully your dark night ends soon.

We will replace the Civic before the GTi, and it will be replaced with something big enough that both adults and the baby can all fit in comfortably. This does’t mean it’s going to be a giant SUV, but given the size and complexity of current child seats, it’ll be a bit bigger than a civic.

I wrote a very detailed post about it some time back when I was going through the process of getting used to cooking at home. You can check it out here – http://bit.ly/qmOwHQ