Budgets & More with YNAB's Jesse Mecham

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Speaker 1: Hi. This is Laura Vandercamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah Hartunger. I'm a mother of three, a practicing physician and blogger. On the side, we are two working parents who love our careers and our families. Welcome to Best of both Worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life. Welcome the best of both worlds. This is Laura. This is episode one hundred and ninety three, which is airing in mid April of twenty twenty one. We're going to be talking with Jesse from Wine App, which is You Need a Budget, Sarah's favorite budgeting app, and so we are very excited to have that. We will also be on that podcast. Maybe we already have been or we will be later. We're doing a podcast trade off there. We always love doing those. We have many of our favorite podcasts that we've been able to do that, which has been a very exciting thing. With doing Best of Both Worlds. We are actually back from Spring Bank. Sarah, you have mid April spring breaks. No, we will have just gotten back. Well, no, we're not going away this year. What am I talking about? No? I thought, you're right. I guess this is after a spring break, but some people I guess have late maybe mid April or late March. Either way that it would be a fun thing to think about as most many of us might be thinking more about next year than we were about this year. Or maybe you just started to think about summer travel. Oh yeah, you know, many people decided not to do that last year, which kind of made sense. We didn't go anywhere in twenty twenty, and we have made the plunge to finally book a VRBO up in Amelia Island, which is one of our favorite places and it is my first VRBO experience. We were going to do one in North Carolina in March of twenty twenty. Understandably that didn't happen, but we look a pretty disastrous trip in twenty nineteen with a toddler in a hotel room, and we're like, wow, never doing that again. And yet we didn't know at the time that that was going to be our last family trip for a very long time. So, you know, a lot of time has passed. We no longer really have a toddler. We have a you know, quasi preschooler, and we are going to have a lot more space than we've ever had on prior trip. So I'm pretty excited about it. So I guess maybe I was thinking more about summer plans and spring break, but a lot of people may have just gotten back from spring break and maybe it was their first time traveling in a long time, and I'd be curious to have that that went for people. Yeah, we're big fans of VRBO or Verbo or however they say it, and home Away, which is the same parent that. Because well, with the family of my size, it's hotel rooms are hard. There are some so some of the big resorts, for instance, have like two bedroom suites. I know that Disney has a lot of those type things, which we have definitely stayed in. You pay through the nose for them, but they do exist. But in normal sort of hotel situations, you have to get two rooms, which is always complicated because then you know, you split the parents and you split the kids, and you hope you're next to each other. Sometimes you get the door between them can open, and that's great, but sometimes you're for whatever reason, on like different floors than the coordination is just zero fun whatsoever. Sometimes it's even with fewer people. When we went to London with the three big kids in twenty eighteen, apparently in Greater London you you almost can't have more than three people in a hotel room. I don't know what the rules are there, why that is as it is, but we absolutely could not book anywhere for more than three people in a hotel room, and so we had to get two and like I mean, we were in like opposite sides of the hotel, going up three four flights of stairs. So it's you know, some places are not set up for that, whereas when you rent a house you can get the space, and so we have definitely booked a lot of vacation homes that way. And then you know, you have the benefit of having a kitchen, so you can have breakfast food. For instance, these days you can get you know, groceries delivered when you're showing up, and then you have groceries and you don't have to go out for breakfast, which it's fun to go out for breakfast, but may not work into everything. I think you get old. You get old, You're like, I just need a coffee, Like where is it now? We're pretty excited, and it's just nice to have like something planned after like such a long period of not really feeling the freedom to plan anything. But I feel this is quite safe. We are obviously vaccinated. I'm hoping the travel guidelines will start to maybe have a little more leeway so that people can feel really good about doing more, but even without just getting out, but driving to a villa on the beach seems like a perfect, pretty pandemic proof getaway. So I'm very excited. Yeah, So we ideally by the time this is airing, our spring break will have been a bunch of day trips in fill it in the north mid Atlantic Northeast area. I know we're going to Gettysburg that we have tickets for the museum, so you get a little Civil War reenactment type fun and we will see about the cherry blossoms in DC. So Pennsylvania relaxed our travel restrictions. I know DC stills to have some, so we may not be able to do it on that end, but we had been you know, I was saying, well, if you left the state for it, was more than twenty four hours. But sometimes when people are a little unclear on that, you had to quarantine or test what you can do. We have tested upon returning to the state, but it just adds a layer of complexity to it. So we had originally planned to do some day trips in Pennsylvania, also because I don't want to take Henry anywhere overnight. I mean, it is hellish enough in our own house with him right now, and so I'm pretty sure we would wind up in the exact same situation that you did in Amelia Island when Genevie was this age, right like, she was what seventeen months and you had that yeah, right around that I think she was about Yeah, I think that's almost exactly right. And yeah, it's funny because I was kind of like, well, from a travel perspective, like I'm not that sad about missing that particular year of travel for our family, like that actually worked out for really good year to have off exactly exactly. All right, Well, let's let's hear what the folks that you need a budget have to say. Well, Sarah and I are delighted to be here with Jesse Meekham, who is the founder of wine App. You need a budget, so Jesse, tell us a little bit about yourself and your family. I started wineap back in two thousand and four when I was studying to become an accountant, and my wife and I got married early and we had our first early as well, and when I felt like we needed to make some more money, that was where That was how wineapp was born. I thought we got to figure out some way to make rent. So we we launched it back when I still had a few years of school left, and then I went off and became a CPA for ten months. Actually I was officially at CPA for a year. You just you have to renew it, and if you don't, that's the end of that. So we didn't last long there. The work hours were were grueling, and I had two little boys at that point. Never saw them. The moment where I knew this was not a thing for me. It was a Saturday, a rare Saturday that I had off, and I would leave around six thirty. The boys weren't awake yet, they were two and zero essentially, and then I would come home at ten thirty Julian and I would be able to say hey to each other for a moment and then repeat. And it was six days a week. So there was a Saturday where Porter, my two year old, did something that made me mad and I yelled at him, and Julie, my wife, just turned on me and in like very like mama bear kind of way, was like, you have no time with him, and anytime you do have, you're going to do that. And it was like, oh, yeah, this is this is I was stressed, I was sapped, emotionally spent. So that was when I knew that this was not a long term thing for us. So we jump ship and I started working on you need to budget all the time. And I've never made my employees work like that. Again. It's so so un it's so unkind. It's side note. But yeah, that was how it started. So we just we've we never took funding or anything. It's just been kind of a slow a slow burn, just growing the team over the last seventeen years now and growing your family too. You guys are up to how many that's true, we're up to seven. So our little guy he came a year ago, perfect timing. It was well, you know this, Laura, it was like it was a little bit iffy at that time, Like you go to the hospital and you're like, is this going to be what's it going to be like? Luckily for us it was totally with the pandemic and stuff, a non event. It was just very, very chill. Everything went fine because I mean, I admit I did. I had read a few home birth books at that point because I was like, I don't know, well, by number seven, I mean you might wind up with an inadvertent on birth. I mean that's true. Yeah, that's actually not far off. Yeah, I just I will tell you this. If you're wondering about home birth, YouTube is the place to go to find out if you want to or you don't like no way, Yeah, yeah, well I narrowly avoided it. But it was not a you know, not a whole lot of time in the hospital before the baby section. It's just an efficient hospital visit is what I would an efficient hospital vision in your in and out. It's all good. So Sarah is a wine app veteran. She has been tracking her spending using wine app for years. But why don't you tell it for our listeners who are not familiar with it, exactly how it works and why it works. So first, first, and foremost, it's a way of thinking about your money. We do sell software to pay the bills, but it really is a way to think and structure your money to where you can get a little bit of control and you can feel like your money is lining up and doing what you really want it to do. So anything I talk about, if I ever mentioned the software, just know that it's not software focused. It's you could implement it with a spreadsheet. You could implement it with a notebook. You could probably use one of our competitors and still be thinking right and using one of their pieces of software. Don't tell me if you do. But the idea is around four rules. Number one is to give every dollar a job, and you only give jobs to money that you actually have, so you can't say I will get money. It's just money you have on hand right now. When new money comes in, you do the same thing, give every dollar a job. The second rule is to look ahead, and we call it embracing your true expenses. But we're talking about looking ahead and thinking about larger, less frequent expenses that should be considered as you are weighing what you should do with your money today. So if you're going to write a novel, you would you would say, well, I'm not going to write the novel all today, but I might write ten pages today, and then you would know that if you did that repeatedly, you would have enough for a novel. And people get sidetracked, or not sidetracked, but kind of blindsided by a car repair or a large expense, and it's just because they aren't considering that that expense should be brought into the equation of how they're planning their money today. Our third rules shouldn't be a rule, but we tell people to roll with the punches, meaning you just made a plan with your money, and it's your money, so it's your plan. You are allowed to change it if you would like to, and people find a lot of freedom. They've associated budgeting with restriction and failure for sure, and now we're trying to say it's more like you're making adjustments at halftime and you're the coach of a team and you're just seeing how the game is going and making calls as needed. And then our fourth rule, we call it aging your money, and we really try and get people by following the first three rules, this will happen usually in about six months. We get people to where they're spending money that they earned thirty days ago. At least, so a dollar I earned today I won't need to actually use until thirty days from now. We get people away from the financial edge. They make better decisions, they literally sleep better. Fights are no longer fights, their discussions because the stress levels aren't so high. It's a good thing in many ways. So that's kind of a high level view. And I've spent the last seventeen years talking about those four rules and Tom Blue in the face. Basically, it's interesting that you see so much of a psychological difference with just thirty days. I mean, I don't know, maybe if I'm just like way more conservative, Like I don't sleep well until it's like six months a year plus more. So, Yeah, you're not average, You're not normal. I mean most people. And I've learned so much more about this going forward, even high earning physicians, so many of them are literally living paycheck to paycheck. And I've even had people tell me like, oh, I'm going to like buy this Tesla, but I need to like wait for my next thing to put it. I'm like, are you like what anyway? I certainly don't think like that, certainly anymore. I don't know if I ever did, but you I'm shocked by how many people that's actually normal, and it's incredibly stressful. I want to ask a selfish question. So my sister I'm trying to get to use you need a budget. But she is a shop owner and so her income is very variable. She owns a yarn store. You might imagine that the winter is as a boom, but the summer is not great. So what do you do in those cases? If it's an entrepreneur or somebody that has a really variable income, how do you help them plan? It's a lot easier if you're starting at the end of the boom and you have all this cash piled up and you're just like, I'm flush. That's not always the case. But what you want to be doing is think. I mean, it's essentially the same exercise of true expenses, embracing that looking ahead for larger, less frequent expenses that you'll need to hit. For your sister, I would have her be budgeting money into months well ahead of that thirty days that I just mentioned. I mean, Laura is off. I mean, I think Laura I'm not speaking out of turning. I think you're essentially self employed and what you do is yeah, So I mean there's a you might be conservatively wired anyway to just want that security of lots of cash. If there was an axiom here or like a heuristic, the more volatile the income, the bigger the buffer you need because you might need to have it, have that volatility be slightly absorbed on the dips. And then the important part and more important part for whether it's you know, a realtor. Right now, realtors are making more money than they've ever made in their lives, and so they're they're just the thing about like make hay while the sun shines. That's that's a real thing. Like there's a reason that phrase has stayed around forever. And what we want to do is make sure that when money is flush, we're looking ahead and we're thinking, Okay, future me, future me will not have this much money. So let's put future me here across the table. And now you're always budgeting with the two of you. If you're in a you know, you're sharing finances with your spouse. There there are actually four of you. There's like future Laura, current Laura and they're all vying for dollars right now, and that's that's a good conversation to have. That's what we want. So your sister needs to think about future sister. What's her name? Rebecca, Rebecca, Rebecca, future Rebecca, and Rebecca. You have to sit down and be like, Okay, future Rebecca, what would you like me to do for you right now? And that's when you start funding things out and stretching those dollars out. I've found that teaching people about the future version of themselves that's on the side of the road that can't afford a tow truck, they're like, oh, yeah, I don't I don't want to do that too, or we really shouldn't do that. Definitely not the future Rebecca. We're going to take a quick ad break and we will be right back. So we are here talking with Jesse Meekham about you need a budget. So, Jesse, one of the things we talk about and sometimes with best of both worlds, is we all have different conceptions of normal. I mean we're talking about this. You know, I'm sort of conservatively wired when it comes to finances and things like that. I'm very curious as you've seen so many budgets and so many people's finances. Have you realized that you had any sort of weird notions of money that other people don't share, that we're more unique to you, or that are less common. I think I'm an ever optimizer, to be frank, and I've had to kind of like bat that down to a degree because at some point the law of diminishing returns kicks in. The best example I have for the ever optimizer meets the naturally smart and beautiful woman that is his wife. That's the story. And when we were first married, Julie and I were She's naturally frugal and I am an optimizer. So that's just a nice way of saying frugal unless it suits my needs, right. I remember we would go grocery shopping and Julie would know the price of everything, just absolutely everything, and we would shop around even we would you know, get the circular whatever it's called, and we would go to another store and we were and we would spend between the two of us when were first married, we would spend one hundred and twenty dollars a month, which is hilarious. I can't even get out of Costco for that with you know, one trip. So you know, years go on and I'm always trying to optimize the budget with specifically groceries, and at that time, grocery shopping fell on Julie. Now it actually is reversed, it's fallen back on me again. But at the time, she was the one that would go out and shop and she has these four kids, and I'm always like, man, we're always over spending in groceries. We're always over spending in groceries, and can we move it down? Can we do this? And she she would agree because she's she's a she's a one on the Enneagram, so she was just like, well, would be right to do this, you know, like I feel like there's a rightness here. So she would agree to it, and then we wouldn't we wouldn't hit it. And it was just this point for years and years, I mean like ten Finally one time I go, I'm the same old conversation again and I'm like, Julie, what are we do you think? We like, we're always overspent it? And she goes a successful grocery trip for me is we go in and out and the kids don't melt down, we have no kid drama. And then it was like, oh, I've been optimizing off of dollars spent instead of after, you know, off of the experience of the shopper, and that that has That was like a I don't know, like a crack in the dam in a good way for me around recognizing like you need to not just say I want to do my money for this and like this this money should go here, this one should go here, but also ask yourself, like what am I optimizing for when I go to Starbucks every day for coffee and I'm not doing I'm not using that as a bad example, just like fully aware, like what are you optimizing for? What am I optimizing for with a grocery trip? And I added money to the budget and we never overspent again and then and she was it was a success for her in that way, and I don't know, I've that's stuck with me for a lot of years, like not just where do you want to spend your money, but like a little bit of a deeper why, like what's the what's the reason here? Why are you pushing down on this spending or why do you want that spending to be so high? Either direction's fine, but just question it a little bit and see what happens. And when you're with your spouse, I mean, bless her heart, she hung with me for ten years on the whole. Hey, you're overspending, you're over spending. But even she had to kind of be like, oh, wait, you know, this is why. It's because I don't care, you know, in the in the nicest way, that's what she was saying, like, I don't care about what you care about here, And it ended up being a big success for us. So that's interesting that you talk about, you know, just like putting more money in a category, because I think a lot people have this idea with budgeting that like, you can't just do that. It's supposed to be as low as possible all the time. It's supposed to be as low as possible. So I mean, let's talk a little bit about why high income people might still need a budget. So your product is called you need a budget, and I presume that you is somewhat universal in this case. It's not everybody except Bob needs a budget. It's it's you need a budget. So let's say that people are in that happy place where the money coming in is generally significantly higher than the money that is going out for their normal life, you know, maintenance and such. What would be the upside to budgeting for them, Well, the upside is more money is flowing through, so you get to use more money for things that you want or care about and your impact greater Bill Gates has a budget it it just has loads of zeros at the end. But you, I mean you think about their whole foundation that you know, like they have all this money, and do you think there's not strategy and thinking and tactics around how are we going to deploy this money to eradicate you know, whatever it is. And that's the bit that I think is interesting is when you make more money, it just means you need to be even more thoughtful about how it should be used. Because you're you're blessed. You know, you're lucky, you're you're able, like things are working for you in a way that is so rare across the history of time that you really could just say, man, this is I don't know if I should call it a stewardship or just the right thing, but when you are blessed with that much success, then I think it's incumbent upon you to say I need to be thoughtful about how these resources are deployed. And I don't mean that it all goes to charity. I just mean that you are thinking hard about what matters to you, because the only way you'll find that piece. And like this satisfaction, this contentment is knowing that the money is doing what you really want it to do. Where people feel the misalignment, that's where they're feeling like, God, what what's going on? They get their w two, you know, high earners, low owners, it's all the same. They all think HR made a mistake. They're like, there's no way I made this much money this year, and HR never makes mistakes. So it was that, you know, But it's that idea of just like this reconciling. Okay, gosh, there's something more here. I just can't let it slip through my fingers. So high earners, I don't say, you wouldn't say you have an obligation, but you certainly have an opportunity to really have an impact because you've been blessed with the ability and environment and whatever else it takes to make more money than you. I don't want to say need, I hate the word need. You have plenty, you know, to be able to have an impact in some way. I don't like needs. And once that's why that needs. Once it's such a lame bifurcation of words. It's like, oh, that's a need. So I never questioned that spending again, it's like, well, oh that's interesting. But if it's a want, then you question that. Well, they're all wants. Do you want to have a house that your kids live in? Yes? I do. Okay, it's all wants, you know. So anyway, Tangent, I just I just had like a parallel John, which is that Laura. You know, I'm not a good time tracker, but I'm a huge time planner. I think I use wine ab in many ways as a money planner, even though there is a tracking component as well, so I can see how well I am doing my plan, so like it allows me to know, Okay, how much does a good amount to be putting into my five twenty nine and how much do I want to be saving for my taxable and how much would I want to be saving for my future car? And what buckets does that go in? And as you know, I am also a huge fan of the allowance for the personal fund money because you and your husband, I think, are an anomaly if you never have arguments about your own personal spending. For me, it's so much healthier for us to know we have no questions, ask money that we can save and do what with what we please. And I think many many couples, if not the majority, probably benefit from that. And your system allows that feature. Yeah, absolutely, just a little bit of breathing room for us. When we were first married, it was five dollars a month, and it made all the difference, literally made all the difference for us. I was like, oh, I can keep doing this. Julie wouldn't spend hers, of course, and I would spend. I would run out, you know, like within two days. So what did you buy with your five dollars? I need to know what? It was? Just a donut every other day or so, walking past I was on my way to class. It was part of my routine. It was Starbucks. Don't judge, don't judge people, is a donut. I'm a fan of Starbucks. That's great, that's great. No, we're both just cheap. So that's one way too, a sort of if you're cheap. But what do you want your money to do, Like, what's your biggest goal with money? Well, we have various things. I mean, we like to be in charge of our lives. And you know, we are at the happy place where we do work because we want to work, and that's great. We are sending, you know, when to have our kids have a good life. We are creating a happy home with lots of fun experiences. We actually are made a somewhat interesting decision for us that we purchased recently a historic house and are now renovating it, which yes, involves more money than we tend to spend experiences galore, but it's going to be quite the experience and living in there with our five kids is going to be a new and exciting chapter. So those are the things we tend to priority. So experiential, like that's top of your list, Okay, yeah, yeah, that's that's phenomenal that you can be clear on that. And then we kind of are wired in that same way, like we don't really want to do, I don't know, go to some random place on a sun like Saturday and go to a museum, but we'll definitely spend three months in New York with the kids to like blow their mind, you know, and that's the experiences, that's what gets Julie going, you know for sure. So I have a question for you know, the various budgeting categories people have, are there any categories that you think people should actually try to spend more on that you think people are generally under allocating for? In your case, you found it was the groceries that you needed to put a little bit more money into. Are there I'm sure there are categories people put too much into, but are there things that people people tend to underinvest in? Well, you'd mentioned when we were recording the my podcast, you'd mentioned laundry. Sarah. You were like, if you don't want to do lin, if you don't want to fold laundry, just have someone do it. And I think in some ways you could look at where you really just don't find joy, and I don't sometimes you just got to buck up, you know, and just like do the things. That's great. But there are things that we found, like a little help I mean with the seven kids, like some help for Julie where she gets a little breathing room and has someone come in and help her out a little bit. That to me is I would spend three times. If the person said, hey, it's actually three times what I told you, I would just like okay, because it's there's so much value there. It was like and with a one year old, like the first year is crazy, and so you can't really make any plans based on how things are in that year. But it was interesting when we I got we re found someone else to help Julie because our our Laura that had come and helped out for so long, Not you, Laura, not to confuse people that are listening, but you would be great. We would love to have you, you you know. But it was she went and got a job full time, and so she couldn't help out anymore, and so we found someone else. And the second day that that person came, I came back from the office and this is gonna sound super cliche, but Julie is into the sourdough thing like everyone else was. A year ago. She couldn't because of the baby, so she was she was late to sourdough, but she had made sourdough bread and I saw them on the counter and I thought, Julie's back. She's back, because that's the kind of thing that she would naturally do if she had some bandwidth. So this is the longest answer to the question. You find, you find things where you're like, the value here is tremendous, and just double down on that. And at some point, yeah, I don't want to have a live in person like I don't think the value is there. But look at a few of those that just bring you a lot of joy, that were like release a stress valve or whatever it is. And yeah, fun that you know, enjoy it, bask in it. Even we are all about spending on ways to make daily life better, Sarah, did you have any other questions? I know we're gonna have to, Sarah have to go to the patient at like one o'clock. So just that he was speaking our love language, and before we head off, we should have him of us a love of that love of the week. Yes, so, Jesse, Sarah and I always end each episode with a love of the week, something that is, you know, rocking our world at the at the moment. We can go first to give you a minute to think about it, Sarah, am I on the spot now first, Now I'll go, so I guess my love of the week today, I'm like looking around my office. Oh okay, well, I'm super into the New Day Designer Planner. That's really dorky, but their releases this week, and you know, I love planners and that's my love of the week. I've been playing with it and I really like it. So I'll go with the pandemic carbs theme here. My daughter and I actually made handmade pasta like homemade pasta recently. I'm not going to say it was the best pasta ever, like, I think we're still working on it. Need to get the dose dinner and slice it thinner in order to avoid a little, you know, chewiness of the result. But you know, we've been branching out. We tried the sourdough. That didn't work so well either. Some roles have turned out better and cookies. The pasta I think is a work in progress. Jesse, how about you. I just finished a book. Our books sometimes loves of the week books are always lovak. I am a big fan of Cal Newport that wrote Deep Work five years ago, and his latest book I think it's called A World Without Email, and I loved it. I was trying to find five minutes to just grab it and read a little bit. It really helped me think about questioning how things are done, like how value is created, how I run things, and not really like for time optimization, but just the fact that email kind of is imposed upon us and we've never stepped back and said, well, is this the way that we should do this work? And so that book I thoroughly enjoyed. I hope that he runs you know, does podcast rounds in his interview to ten, because I'd love to listen to him on all these different places. Well here, yes, yes I will. I will have to send you the link he was on Best Laid Plan And yes, I'm a super fan. I love cow Newport. Yes, well, Jesse, hopefully your employees aren't having to check their email every six minutes. The band of our existence is slack. It's it's like, oh, we don't do the email and yeah, it's like okay, this is just as bad or worse. So yeah, we got to figure it out before we go. Just remind our listeners where to find you with they want to learn more or absolutely why you need a budget, so you can go to uneedabudget dot com. But if you're optimizing for time, you can just type in wynam dot com y nap and then you're there too, save yourself, save yourself so much time? Yeah, and then what will you do with it? You know, think about that. But you can also listen to our podcasts that you Need a Budget podcast where you can listen to this sultry voice for a few minutes every week. And then I do have a book. It was back in when we were in Manhattan a few years ago. We launched a book called You Need a Budget, and uh audible seems to be the way people like to consume that, so you know, we're we're to be found for sure, and listen to Jesse's voice telling you that you in fact need a budget? Absolutely all right, Well, Jesse, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Sarah, thank you are thank you all right? Well, Sarah, why don't you tackle this question? Okay, this is a perfect on theme budget related question. I didn't even mean to do that, but now I'm happy that I did. So. This person writes, thanks for all you do on best of both worlds. Can I ask you a don't skimp on childcare questions? So I guess she already knew the answer, specifically, is it insane to spend nearly seventy five K annually on childcare context. I'm a physician, my husband is an attorney, and I suspect our financial situation has some parallels to yours in terms of earnings, goals, values, et cetera. We have twin three year olds currently in care with a full time nanny who we love and depend on. They are starting in a Montessori school in the fall, and my husband and I are trying to figure out how that changes our childcare structure. Because the school runs from eight am to one pm for nine months of the year with a three month umber break. We've considered many options for childcare. However, we could keep coming back to the idea that we keep our nanny for at least forty guaranteed hours per week plus the school tuition. I realized financials or finances are exceedingly personal, and at the end of the day, if we are meeting our savings goals, then it shouldn't matter. But at fifty K a year for our nanny and twenty two K a year for school tuition, this is the writer's numbers. Does it seem insane and unseemly to spend the price of a new Mercedes every year on childcare. Is that number shocking or is this just the price of doing business in a dual career couple. So first of all, I have to say, like, maybe one of the reasons we don't have any Mercedes because all the money is going elsewhere. So my one word answer. She asked if it was shocking, and I'm like, well, whatever, the opposite of shocking is that's kind of more my emotions about that. I mean, our numbers are higher than that, if it makes her feel any better, and I don't really have that much. It just is what it is. Maybe because I'm farther into it, maybe if you had told me that in the beginning, like it would have shocked me more. But like, yeah, I think that there are few other things that I would rather spend my money on than peace of mind regarding my children so that I can work, like I mean really and also education or activity type expenses like that is what I value. And I am lucky as are you to have a well compensated job. So that's kind of the price of doing it that way. But I feel like it's been fully worth it if that has Yeah, I'd so much rather have great childcare and a good school situation than new Mercedes. So I feel like it would be more shocking if you'd be like, well, we shouldn't send our kids to a good school and have a good nanny, let's get the Mercedes instead, Like that would strike me as a wee bit more shocking. So I think this woman's values are in the right place. And so no, I don't think that's shocking either. You know, if you have kids, you're paying any private school tuition for as Sarah and I both are right now, partly because of the COVID situation with hybrid remote school. We both have children that just weren't going to thrive in that situation, and so we needed full time in person school and to both of us elected to do private school for those particular children this year. And then you know, full time childcare. If you want a good person, you pay a salary that is commensurate with that. So yeah, of course you're going to get numbers that are as this woman said, you know, seventy or more thousand dollars a year. But I would point out if she is paying seventy two thousand, that is what thirty six per person per adult in her household, if she is a physician and her husband is an attorney. I would not be surprised if each of them are in fact earning more than two hundred thousand a year, and possibly more than that two hundred three hundred easy, and so it's not really a big chunk of that. It's I mean, it is a chunk. But on the other hand, you're better off if this is something you would want to do with your life, that you would like to continue working as a physician who is able to concentrate on your job, then you are much better off having this as an expense than thinking you should somehow be saving money on it. And so I totally agree that they've considered many options and they are coming to the right one. I will go ahead and put my vote there. That you have three year olds, they are only in school for five hours a day, five days a week, for nine months a year like this, there's going to get flick. There's going to be a million vacation days they're gonna get since you're going to need a break because they're twins. Yeah, both of them. You know, both of them could get sick, both of them. You know, you could have again school closures for things. There will be random days off, like we have conference days off for stuff, and it's just there's so many reasons like if especially if she's a physician who has to work in person, like you can't do it, and you know, presumably he can't really cover it that easily either, so you know, no, but we approve of your setup. Yeah, all right, so not shocking at all listener, and for anyone else who is facing those numbers as well. All right, well, this has been best of both worlds. We have been talking all things money with the you need to budget folks. We'll be back next week with Moura on making work and life fit together. Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.