What's the biggest financial sacrifice you've ever made?

[jeffrey]

One of the things that comes with getting your finances in order is the need to make sacrifices from time to time. What is the biggest sacrifice that you had to make to get your finances in order?

[lorraineb]

I gave up my car for a year. It was a tough year and it was a pain to get around but it had to be done to make end meet at the time. I wouldn't want to do it again, but knowing that I could if things get bad is a sort of comfort.

[disneysteve]

We bought a very modest home. At the time we bought, we earned about 85K. 2.5 times 85 would have been 212.5K. But I was dealing with 100K in student loans so that just wasn't realistic. We paid 142K for our house, less than 1.7 times our income. An extra 70K would have gotten us a much nicer house, and the payments wouldn't have been a big problem because within 2 years we were earning over 100K but we wanted to keep our costs down and be able to attack the debt aggressively. Of course, it really paid off over time and I'd do it all again if I had to.

[hamchan]

I haven't had a car for 10 years.

[HappySaver]

Tiny fixer-upper first house. We also would have been approved for more, but we stuck with our comfort level and stayed well under the limit. We sacrificed size and we lived through renovations, but it was well worth it.

[Fizgig]

Kind of similar to Steve, I've always kept my housing expenses as low as as I can reasonably allow, and that's involved making a lot of sacrifices. Right now I'm a 36 year old professional making six figures in DC, and I live in a 500 sq apartment with a window unit AC and 2 linear feet of counter space in the kitchen. But, it's a 10 minute walk to a metro station and a block from a cute downtown, and is an easy short commute to work. I spend probably about half what most people in my position would.

Most of the places I've lived were the same - for the last few years in Colorado I shared a house with two dudes from craigslist, and it was great. That was while teaching at the university. My housing expenses including utilities were only around $700/mo in Boulder CO which is really expensive.

When I owned a house for 10 years in TX, there was a garage apartment that paid the mortgage, so I was only on the hook for taxes and insurance. I really liked that house, but it had it's drawbacks too. 1200 sq ft and quirky as hell, I kinda miss it.

Having low committed expenses for my whole adult life have let me shovel a lot into retirement and personal savings, and have no debt at all.

[HappySaver]

Other sacrifices we make are not having cable tv, landline for phone, or smartphones (although my husband has a smartphone from his work, I just have a basic phone). We don't miss cable tv or landline for phone - we just use the internet for viewing/talking. We also don't have Netflix or Prime - we just take things out from the library. The only thing I kind of consider a sacrifice is my not having a smartphone, but it's not that big a deal.

These aren't huge sacrifices, but most peers in our situation would have these things.

[MonkeyMama]

This was a hard question for me to answer. We've made several large sacrifices, but most of them were just brief delayed gratification (in the end). Or we never had this or that, so it's not exactly the same "sacrifice" if you don't even know what you are missing out on.

Anyway, so I was kind of stumped and then I saw all the house comments. Well, DOH. We grew up in one of the most expensive cities in the U.S. and moved about 100 miles out of that city to significantly decrease our living expenses. So, no doubt that is the biggest sacrifice we made. (Most our friends and relatives just think we are crazy).

Why this did not come to front of mind in the slightest, when the question was asked? Because we bought a large home in a luxury community to make up for for, you know, leaving everything we knew (it was a lateral move from a condo on the so-so side of the tracks). We live twice as well on half as much. Our kids' public school education is nothing we could ever dream of if we moved back to old city. So, this is what "sacrifice" looks like, I guess. Which is kind of how most our sacrifices have gone over the years. Not having large financial worries is "priceless."

{At the time we moved this felt like a HUGE sacrifice. It's extremely disconcerting not to know how you are even going to survive financially in the only city you have ever lived; where all your family and friends are. & we certainly felt it without more close family support when our kids were little. But the sacrifices just paid off so quickly}.

[Reggie]

Ditto on housing. I bought a less expensive, foreclosed house (waited a year) and paid cash. It's now worth 2.5 times what I paid and I only have to worry about taxes and insurance. I don't have 4000 sq ft and a guard in a gated community but my home is only 3 years old and I love it!!

[Caoineag]

Sacrifice implies that you felt a loss so I will say our biggest one was going without a car for nearly 4 years. We sold the car when we graduated college to keep expenses low while starting out and that really saved us a ton at a time we couldn't afford extra expenses.

Keeping housing costs low has never been a sacrifice to us because we have never had anything that took a bigger share of the budget.

[sblatner]

Housing for us. We bought what I considered a starter home (1400 sq feet, 3 bedroom, 2 bath, no family room) in 1994 and have never moved. We just can't fathom paying more for a house, paying to move, more property taxes, more upkeep, and starting all over again on a loan. Our "starter" home ended up being the place that we will retire in and will probably never move from. It is perfect for the rest of our lives. We are thankful we were too cheap to waste money.

[EarlyRetirementJoy]

Not that I expect any sympathy here, really, but we resisted purchasing luxury autos or moving up to a home more in line with our gross annual salaries, in order to achieve early retirement.

In our early years we gave up buying new vehicles, and purchased our home based on just one salary, not two, in order to achieve the same goal.

In our really early years, our biggest sacrifice was not buying anything, and I do mean anything, on credit. If we couldn't pay for it in cash (meaning pay our credit card bill off in full at month's end) we couldn't afford it, plain and simple.

Nobody would have wanted to trade lives with us our first 20 or so years of marriage I'm quite sure, but now, with our financial goals achieved and hopefully another 40 or so years ahead of us, I'm quite sure there are a lot of people that would like to trade lives with us now.

[feh]

I think the definition of "sacrifice" is going to vary from person to person. For example, I don't consider purchasing an affordable home a sacrifice.

By my definition, I can't think of a single sacrifice I've made. I've always been employed since college graduation, and I've never had to go without basic needs.

[riverwed070707]

We downsized from a 2600 sq ft house we thought would be our first and only home in the city we wanted to spend our lives to a 625 sq ft bungalo built in 1900 in our hometown so that we could aggressively pay off debt, DH could attend school full-time and have family nearby to help with DD while doing so. Three years later, we're back in the original house now (which we didn't plan to do when we downsized) and loving it, especailly now that we have our finances in order and can afford the bigger home on a single income and less crazy, work-driven lifestyle that what we had to endure when we were here the first time.

[LivingAlmostLarge]

Staying in our house instead of moving when we had our kids. It's a small townhouse with a lot of stairs. Most would say without a yard or garage it's not exactly kid friendly. Also no basement or storage. Lacks closets and is very old. But it's a nice location for commuting and we can afford it.

I should also add for the longest time we kept really old and small cars for people making as much as we did. Most people making what we did went out and bought nice cars asap. Until last year I still had a 99 corolla and we made a very good income according to our taxes.