Hi Jen,
I agree. Americans do not need two cars in every garage. It’s nice. However, what possible purpose is there in two or more televisions? Why should you keep up with the Jones’ anyway? Do we really need to purchase 12 pounds of candy for halloween? Where can we cut? How do you budget? Where do we teach these skills?<<
They need two cars for a number of reasons. Maybe even three cars. If both husband and wife work and they have jobs in different directions, then that right there is a need for two cars. A third car is a back up in case one of the other two fails or needs to spend a day in the shop. Myself and my wife only have one car at present and its 15+ years old. I’m not worried about keeping up with the Jones’. I drive an older car right now because it saves my wife and I an extra $300 a month between car payments and additional insurance and thats an extra $3,600 a year we can invest in our retirement. And we feel investing in our retirement while we are still relatively young is important. Newer cars will late to later. But I drive her to work each day, then work from home 3-4 days a week, and only head up to the shop to do printing and fill orders a couple days a week.
There are just the two of us in our household yet we own 4 tvs. On in the living room, one in the guest bedroom, one in my wife’s office and one in the master bedroom. We watch tv in all of those rooms at one time or another. But then, except for the TV in our living room, the other three are all 19" TVs that we bought on sale between $60 and $100 and we’ll own them for years, so its not like this is a huge expense.
Anyway, my wife puts 12% of her salary directly into her 401K with 6% matched from her employer. We recently set up a 401K plan here at the Guild for the staff and I am currently putting 10% of my salary into my 401K. It just makes sense. The second we have our first kid we’ll begin investing into a tax differred college fund for them to make sure we invest early and smartly into making sure their college tuition is taken care of.
As to the subject of teaching Economics, yes, I think that is VERY important. However, I very much fear the idea of economics being taught to children currently in the American school system. Such a large portion of educators in our country proscribe to a level of liberalism that it worries me and with that comes a completely different take on global economics than is conventional and, well, it just doesn’t match real economics much. If given the choice of having the children indoctrinated into the wrong teachings on economics vs having no teachings, I would prefer none. That way we can at least educate our children ourselves on this very important topic.
Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Publishing Group
http://www.guildofblades.com
http://www.1483online.com
http://www.thermopylae-online.com
