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i had 6 implants put in 8 years ago . i rejected 1/2 of them . put in 3 more 2 years ago . i just had a nasty infection in the implant canal which just add a lot of bone so i had a bone graft last month and the implant came out . going for an evaluation in two weeks on the bone graft to see if it can support another implant ..
my wife is a whole other story . we put 15k in to her teeth last year .
whew! I'm lucky to have just two ... no ... three now ... pinhole cavities. Guys in our family die young but our teeth look great
I did a detailed budget spreadsheet. Really helps you focus on what you spend. I enjoy doing it. It doesn’t stop us from spending but helps to see what we are spending.
fidelity full view links all our accounts and banks and with no input from us tracks every penny we spend with a click .
i don't really care where the money goes , we don't really do anything i won't do again , but i do need to know where we stand in total
The key to budgetting for retirement is to know what you are spending NOW, and make some educated guesses on where that will change. You also have to include for things that happen annually, or randomly. This is where some people screw up and under-budget. Some things even happen less then annually like tires for the car. So we built amounts for auto maintenance and repairs into our "monthly" retirement budget, knowing that those were things that would really be spent on an annual or as needed basis. Same with vet bills for the pets. We know that they need shots and exams every year, but they also might need something more serious, so we add about $500/year per pet for vet bills. Honestly it sounds like a lot, but we don't want to have to put down a pet because we didn't budget for xrays and medicine for them. We try not to use credit cards for anything we can't pay off every month, but they are there for an area we might have missed in the budget, and then we just adjust for that the next month, by spending less on something discretionary and then pay off the card. We could always get into the emergency fund, but we try to save that for true emergencies and not bad planning.
i had 6 implants put in 8 years ago . i rejected 1/2 of them . put in 3 more 2 years ago . i just had a nasty infection in the implant canal which just add a lot of bone so i had a bone graft last month and the implant came out . going for an evaluation in two weeks on the bone graft to see if it can support another implant ..
my wife is a whole other story . we put 15k in to her teeth last year .
So sorry you are having problems with the implants. Everything I see about implants [mainly by those who profit off of them] makes it sound like you go in, get your implants, and all is perfect in "dental heaven" from thereon. Thank you for helping me see that that is not always the case.
we planned a lifestyle where the non discretionary bills like rent , auto insurance , health insurance , taxes , etc account for about 1/2 the budget . those are things we have no say over .
all the rest like food ,gifts ,travel ,clothes , entertainment , my drumming costs , our hobbies cost , our car are all discretionary and since they consume 50% of the budget if push comes to shove we have plenty of room to adjust .
so we don't really care about what we spend on , only that we are within budget because we can always cut it back .
however , we could have lived in manhattan instead of queens . that would cost us the same budget but it would be 80% non discretionary . that would not be healthy. so while both are considered " living below our means " a saying i hate , they both can have very different outcomes .
So sorry you are having problems with the implants. Everything I see about implants [mainly by those who profit off of them] makes it sound like you go in, get your implants, and all is perfect in "dental heaven" from thereon. Thank you for helping me see that that is not always the case.
i was prediabetic and the bone in spots just did not like the implants .
we planned a lifestyle where the non discretionary bills like rent , auto insurance , health insurance , taxes , etc account for about 1/2 the budget . those are things we have no say over .
all the rest like food ,gifts ,travel ,clothes , entertainment , my drumming costs , our hobbies cost , our car are all discretionary and since they consume 50% of the budget if push comes to shove we have plenty of room to adjust .
The reality is that most of your "non-discretionary" spending is actually discretionary. My non-discretionary housing costs in 1998 were $35K. Now, if you count everything like property taxes, insurance, water/sewer, gas, electric, ..., it's $6K. You can do the same thing with auto/auto insurance.
Otherwise, I agree with what you're saying 100%. You live your life according to your cash flow. If you don't have the cash flow to support your lifestyle, you apply the shrink ray to it. For a lot of things, you can spend much less without any particular drop-off in quality of life. All my leisure stuff is like that. If I need to change it, I'll change it.
What we call non discretionary are the things we won’t change .... in fact my gym was in that number before silver sneakers. It is an important part of our life and my health so unless we were forced these things are not going to be cut.
This is very different then our traveling , the gifts we give , all the eating out and bringing in we do . All of that can be adjusted ...
Irrigation system? I've never lived anywhere where irrigation for a regular lawn would even be necessary!
Arizona and Tennessee have vastly different climates. Phoenix is largely low-elevation desert.
There, if you want your landscaping to be anything other than cacti and rocks, you need irrigation. Especially if you want fruit and shade trees. Summer lasts five months in Phoenix.
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A wine cellar? I rarely drink wine.
We don't drink wine, either. That's why we're shutting down the wine cellar cooling system to save money. It's a great space for a party, though.
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My lifestyle is simpler and more affordable.
We weren't looking for ordinary. We're old, we have no children and we want to live as luxuriously as possible for as long as possible without running out of money. That's us. Other people have different goals.
Remedying the $500 electric bill ought to be easier. We start by shutting off three of the refrigerators and the unit that cools the wine cellar. If anyone wants a bottle of random red, just stop by. They left a lot of it behind.
You might consider solar panels. AZ gets lots of sun. Federal tax credit is 30% of the cost and I think AZ throws in a credit also. Our electric bill has gone down to $25/month. But our house is no doubt a lot smaller.
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