I have no disagreement!
To qualify on the question you raised:
Basically, a Bentley when a Maybach would have sufficed, if the balance had allowed for saving for college.
But - I guess it comes down to individual priority: how we value our own gratification vs. what we want for our kids. It’s a personal decision / weighing, not an absolute right/wrong.
I don’t have any problem nor any judgement of how people spend and how people save. As long as it isn’t my money - it isn’t my business.
I do take issue with families with healthy incomes who haven’t saved for college who then bewail and bemoan the high price of education and/or why there isn’t more ‘free’ money aka aid available from the colleges, the state gov’t, the federal gov’t, etc.
If you want people to mind their own business and not mentally spend/save your money, then reciprocally you can’t mentally expect/spend their money either.
This is not at all unusual in the state of Virginia (where we lived for several years). I mean UVA, William and Mary, Va Tech and several others are just plain great schools.
I’ll disagree. Sometimes it is totally right or wrong. Some people need to get priorities straight.
Way back when my (future at the time) in-laws spent a huge junk of money to build a pool. Half that amount would have sent their D to college at the time. Never forgave them to this day. Sorry, still mad.
Absolutely!
Lots of thoughts here! Here are a few more of mine…
I agree that what other families do is none of my business. But… I do cringe when parents set their kids up for heavy student loan obligations, especially when the salaries in the field of study are low.
Yes, it is smart to do the money research / discussions before applications. But it’s hard to blame the parents when there are guidance counselors (my old/2006 example) who ran a college planning meeting and advised , “apply everywhere that interests you…. then see how the scholarships / financial aid offers play out”. That seemed crazy to me, since many students at this high school were interested in schools with no merit scholarships and had family incomes/savings beyond the range of financial aid. I remember sending a website link to a GC that had a ballpark calculator for EFC - it was a new to her. Hopefully things have improved since then.
I think you responded in your post to the wrong person. Abasket is in agreement with you.
I like to understand things that are out of the ordinary. For example my D23 is about to head off to Central Michigan U. We are from the burbs of Chicago so some kids do make their way over to CMU, but not a ton and definitely not a lot from her HS. D23 has high stats, not extremely high but very solid. If you are an outsider to our family you might wonder why is she going there especially when she was accepted to UW Madison, Pitt, Boston U, MiamiOH. Well D23 ended up with a full ride to CMU and she is able to get a minor in ASL along with her teaching degree. All in all it was the best overall fit for her when all factors were considered.
I am always on the lookout for things that are out of the ordinary and sometimes that comes in the form of what the neighbors are doing. Do their amount and quality of vacations track with what I know about what they do? Sometimes you have a neighbor that never goes anywhere or never gets a new car. Contrasts with the one that gets a new car every 2 years.
For the most part everyone lives in a range that is within one std deviation of the mean, but at times people stray further from that mean and it is interesting to know why. Most of the time it isn’t any of my business, but it can be entertaining.
Yep, I didn’t mean to respond to @abasket, I meant to respond to the thread. Thanks for pointing that out, busdriver11!
Our next door neighbor drives an expensive Mercedes. He works at a Mercedes dealership as a mechanic. He gets a huge discount when he buys cars from the dealership. He also does make pretty good money.
D has a friend who is a flight attendant. She travels all over the world, but oftentimes it’s when she’s working a flight. She also gets flight privileges as well.
I have a college friend who travels a lot for work and she has racked up the points and miles and uses those to travel other times.
Some people have wealthy parents who help out or take them vacation…you just never know. And a lot of people can live beyond their means…
You also don’t know what they DON’T do to afford that stuff. My cousin and her husband buy a new fancy car every year, they almost never go on vacation. If they do go on vacation it’s just a quick weekend trip to Palm Springs (2 hours from where they live). They also live in a nice retirement community. And they didn’t pay for college, the military paid for their son to go to college and their daughter went to college in her late 30’s. Not paying for college frees up a lot of money.
My sister and her husband live in a nice house and take nice trips every year. They don’t have kids…they’re the typical DINKS. If they had had kids, they probably wouldn’t have taken the first class trips to Europe once or twice a year.
I know people who go to Europe every year, but they drive an old car and rarely eat out at home. I know people who paid for a private college for their kid, but they lived in a modest home, their high schooler did not have a car to drive at 16, and they sent their kid to a public high school and they didn’t take trips. We knew a family who wanted to send their daughter to a private school, but they didn’t want to sell their ocean-view house with a pool, they couldn’t afford the mortgage and the private school tuition.
We all have different priorities…
As a mechanic with plenty of knowledge and experience with fixing Mercedes cars, he also avoids much of one of the annoyances of owning a Mercedes, which is the expensive maintenance and repair costs.
One of my cousins went to Central Mich. Absolutely loved it, and she posts pics of meetups with the college friends all the time. Was a journalist, later a librarian. No regrets on her part!
We made sure everyone in our clan has at least one degree or professional training from our big state U. 
SIL2 has some catching up to do. Might have to sponsor his MBA or something when the shock of being a new parent wears out. 
Go CHIPS! (Chippewas)
I’m a grad. It was a state school for me. In our family’s world back then that’s really all we knew - state schools. Worked out totally fine.
Central–both DH’s parents were tenured professors there. SIL earned her MBA there. I fell in love with the old 27-room elegant Victorian former frat house they spent decades reviving (from frat use). In my 20’s, I learned to drink ice-cold martinis swaying in the white wicker swing on the huge wrap-around porch in the summers. And, there was a carriage house where FIL had his studio.
On topic though, the enormity of that house for one family made me think they were rich. I didn’t understand academic salaries or know that they rented out the third floor and the top floor of the carriage house to students to cover the mortgage payments, and they belonged to a food co-op and had a large vegetable garden to offset the cost of feeding a seven-person family. They dressed in “gently worn” with no labels in sight. In retrospect, it was a paycheck-to-paycheck hippie lifestyle, but it seemed grand to me.
(I harbored hope that DH and I would inherit that house but, when all the kids were gone, his parents sold it and retired to LA. The house went back to a fraternity, got trashed (again), and sat abandoned for several years until someone with means bought it and did a complete renovation. My in-laws sent us an article about it. We’re so happy the house is now what it should be, but I still have regrets.)
I’d love to know where this house was in Mount Pleasant!
My husband and I met working summers during college at Cedar Point. He went to CMU and I kept seeing all these CMU t -shirts. Turned out it was Central Michigan University (but took me awhile to figure that out!). Lots of visitors from Michigan at the park .
Are you the parent who asked about Central months ago because your children had a scholarship opportunity? If so, glad it worked out!
I reflexively think Carnegie Mellon when I see “CMU” 
Exactly. The only CMU I knew was Carnegie Mellon University, where husband went. That’s why I initially was confused about all these CMU t-shirts and sweatshirts I was seeing! Go Tartans! Go CHIPS!
I went to state schools, so did our kids. We have always lived below our means, to circle back to the original topic!