<p>I do NOT want to get married until my early/mid 30’s (well past 30-like 32, 33, 34). Anytime in my 20’s is too early for me. I’ve got law school to go through and a career to establish. I’ll be 26 when I finish law school and I’ll have to basically pour everything I have into my career until I’m at least 30. I want to at least own some real estate too pre-marriage. Thankfully I won’t be saddled with any student debt and will have modest savings. If I had student debt to pay off marriage would be delayed by another 2 years.</p>
<p>I want no more than two kids. For every kid I’ve gotta come up with ~$1 mil in cash ($250k for college, $250k for grad school, $400k for private school), and there are only so many millions I can come up with on a lowly lawyer’s salary. And it becomes increasingly harder to find a place to live when you require more than 4 bedrooms.</p>
<p>My ideal spouse will be a member of the medical profession, hopefully in one of the “softer” specialties like pediatrics.</p>
<p>If we fail at having kids, we’ll just register as foster parents.</p>
<p>do you really need to pay for your kid’s grad school?</p>
<p>I plan on living somewhere with excellent public schools so I don’t have to pay for private school, and hopefully my kid will get scholarships. But I’ll still be putting moolah in a 529.</p>
<p>My parents are paying for my law school. And in return I feel obligated to do the same for my kids. Or fully fund them at least through college.</p>
<p>I plan on living in a top public school district too but sometimes public school just isn’t good enough. Maybe because they’re socially awkward, or have special needs or whatever.</p>
<p>And if everything goes as planned, I’ll be making mid 6 figures combined with low to mid 6 figures from the spouse which means there’s no way in hell my kids would get need based aid. Not counting on merit aid.</p>
<p>I met my husband in the second semester of my senior year of college. We were both in a ballroom dancing class (to fulfill a PE requirement). You just never know. We dated for 2 years, I finished grad school, we got married at 24, he went to med school, had our first child at 34. It’s okay to get married young and wait to have children. Our oldest is graduating from high school this year.</p>
<p>Haha I think it’s funny how some of you planned things out so well; married by ___ age, ___ number of years of marriage without kids, ____ as the prime reproductive years, ___ numbers of kids…</p>
<p>Gee, and I thought I planned well by picking my major early freshmen year :/</p>
<p>Honestly, I could never get married early (before 24 or so). Even though I’ve always been very independent and don’t rely on my parents for much, I still feel like a kid sometimes…I would feel like I’m “playing grown-up” if I got married soon. Plus I haven’t dated much so I kind of want to play the field a bit more, so to speak.
I would like to be married before 30 though.</p>
<p>I think CC just attracts the anal-retentive, control-freaky types (in other words, the CC population is, on average, more anal-retentive/control-freaky).</p>
<p>i have to say that in my life experience, nothing ever goes to plan! even if i try my best to plan everything out and think of every possible scenario that could happen, something unexpected always happens that i could not possibly have foreseen/planned for… so be ready to have a backup plan :)</p>
<p>The thought of any of my friends actively looking for their husband/wife is just a funny thing to imagine. However, I know many who do meet future spouses in college.</p>
<p>I’ll be actively looking for a husband until I find him (would be nice if that search lasted less than 12 years…<em>cough</em>) :p. Of course it won’t be my main priority but it’s there. Think of it as a mere side dish alongside the main entree if my life were a dinner. Would never waste my time dating someone who I couldn’t see as a future spouse. (I wouldn’t openly mention that to him though :p.)</p>
<p>Funny, I attend a top 20 school. I plan to enter the workforce right away, but I am thinking I will probably put off law school until any kids I have are in school. Trying to balance new law grad hours and being a mom to infants who are completely dependent on me is not something that appeals to me. I’ve thought long and hard about it and that is not the life I want to live. And I just could not in good conscience leave a newborn at daycare all day. I will revisit the law school path if I still want to go when my kids are older and less dependent on me. As important as education is to me, I am not willing to give up everything else I want in life for it. And frankly, I would much rather consider law school after I’ve paid down my undergrad debt anyway. That was a huge factor in that decision, too.</p>
<p>Granted, I didn’t make any of these plans well in advance. This is just what my fiance and I have been discussing in the last year. Our wedding is set for a year after we graduate, will consider trying for kids a year or two later, and I will HAPPILY make use of my bachelors degree until such time that selling my soul to the legal profession becomes more realistic financially and in the context of my other goals.</p>
<p>Definitely. I’m a sophomore in college but I can vouch. Life has a way of getting in the way of our perfect plans. So I try to plan ahead - or at least have a general course of action laid out - but I try to stay as flexible and open as possible. Sometimes life’s curveballs are bad or upsetting and other times they can be wonderful twists we never saw coming.</p>
<p>Curveballs as almost always (99.9% of the time) evil. It takes certainty and predictability out of the equation.</p>
<p>As a future lawyer, I like predictability and certainty. I like change, but if and only if initiated by me, and if and only if I have a general idea of the range of possible outcomes and that range is acceptable to me.</p>
<p>I have pretty much accepted that anything I have planned could turn out drastically different. But I like to at least have an outline of where I think I might like to be. Then I just roll with the punches and see how things turn out. It was important for me to come up with some idea of what my expectations were about some of these things since I know I AM getting married in two years, my fiance and I had to know we were on the same page with kids and work and whatnot. If he hadn’t wanted to have any kids until he was in his thirties we would have had to have a discussion about that before we committed to marry.</p>
<p>Yeah…you might want to wait until you actually find the girl before deciding that. Most women want at the very least their families there. I’m not saying we all want huge weddings to rival Princess Diana’s, but I don’t know too many who want to completely forgo any kind of celebration with loved ones. You might want to elope - she might not.</p>
<p>He (or she) who shall be stuck with the bill shall have the final say.</p>
<p>Often she decides everything and he’s stuck paying for it. That’s so not fair and I won’t have it.</p>
<p>If she wants a Princess Diana ceremony, she shall pay for it, and as long as I don’t have to put in a cent, I’ll go along with it. And the plan is to maintain completely separate finances so it’ll just be her.</p>
<p>I semi-agree with you. Weddings are overrated, but trust me, at least one of the parties involved is going to want family members there. </p>
<p>My fiance and I are going to do simple handfasting ceremony on a beach up north. Friends and family only. All together, it is going to cost MAYBE $5k. My parents got married in the middle of our town under a gazebo. When all was said and done, their only real expense was the cost for the marriage certificate and the reception (rented out a local restaurant which gave them a nice deal. Small town kind of thing). Weddings can be simply and still be celebrations.</p>
<p>EDIT: After reading your last post, I fear that you have no idea what goes in to a wedding. The majority of the time, the bride’s family takes care of a LOT of the bills, unless the groom’s family is much richer.</p>
<p>Besides, if you’re going to marry someone, you better BOTH have a say in it. And since you will be SHARING your finances for your marriage, you would technically BOTH be paying for it.</p>
<p>Nope. Separate bank accounts, separate credit cards, separate mortgage notes, separate car loans. Neither party cosigns for anything for the other. Clear division of expenses (I pay mortgage/insurance/property tax, she pays tuition, etc). Taxes filed separately unless the tax bill is lower by filing joint, and if filed joint, each person pays proportionally. Airtight prenup that stipulates that ALL property is the sole nonmarital property of the acquirer. As far as the bank is concerned, we will look like two distinct, independent persons. It’s unromantic but so is family court. I don’t want the companionship of someone who won’t accept me as the “cold” and emotionally detached person I am. But when it comes to money, you HAVE to be. Otherwise you start making stupid decisions that cost you money.</p>
<p>I don’t see any reason for both parties to ruin their individual credit by taking out credit in both parties’ name (in the case in which one person has drastically better credit than the other).</p>
<p>Married couples fight about a long list of things all the time. I don’t need to add money to that list. Your chances of divorce go down when you eliminate the #1 cause of divorce besides marriage.</p>
I plan to enter the workforce right away, but I am thinking I will probably put off law school until any kids I have are in school. Trying to balance new law grad hours and being a mom to infants who are completely dependent on me is not something that appeals to me. I’ve thought long and hard about it and that is not the life I want to live. And I just could not in good conscience leave a newborn at daycare all day. I will revisit the law school path if I still want to go when my kids are older and less dependent on me. As important as education is to me, I am not willing to give up everything else I want in life for it. And frankly, I would much rather consider law school after I’ve paid down my undergrad debt anyway. That was a huge factor in that decision, too.</p>
Then I just roll with the punches and see how things turn out. It was important for me to come up with some idea of what my expectations were about some of these things since I know I AM getting married in two years, my fiance and I had to know we were on the same page with kids and work and whatnot. If he hadn’t wanted to have any kids until he was in his thirties we would have had to have a discussion about that before we committed to marry.</p>