I’m a technical contractor and my husband is management-level at a very small company (under 30 employees). We pay over $500/mo. for health insurance for a family of 4. That’s employer-provided health insurance.

Just as a single data point!

Nothing here about eldercare – some of our peers are cobbling together $4-5 thousand a month for an aging parent. With siblings, that’s a lot more reachable than if you are an only child. It’s hugely variable, our parents saved enough to get them through their last illnesses. If your parents pulled every dime out of their house with HELOCs (think cute bumper sticker: “we’re spending our children’s inheritance” on a car with Florida plates) and went on cruises, and now they need you, that’s a kick in the butt.

Benefits are huge, as you know better than I – a real estate agent and a handyman, each self-employed, would be looking at over a thousand a month, and God help them if they have a special needs kid.

We’re later in the family life cycle than some – 2 of ours are in middle school, so aftercare has gone away, we bought our house a long time ago before the Great Run-up, student loans are a distant memory. And I have benefits, which cover our family (I tell my self-employed wife that she really NEEDS her ‘husband with benefits’…) So a hundred thousand looks plausible. One size definitely does not fit all, here.

That’s probably because there were far fewer two-income couples. Why the scare quotes around necessities? With two school aged children and both parents working, what do you propose to do with them between 3:30 and 6 every weekday and all day long all summer that’s going to be free?

I agree with you that household items can be a lower percentage, although maybe if you average out the seasonal clothes shopping, that’s not true?

Once you ditch daycare costs, you have to add back extracurricular fees and summer camps. But those “necessities” barely existed in my world back in the late 1970s. (I mean, there was church camp, but that was cheap, and after-school classes at the school, but those were free. Then again, I still regret not having taken piano lessons.)

A factor left out is how the adults in the family get to their income level. The $108k job – or even the $54k job – probably involved grad school, and grad school debt; it’s unrealistic not to put at least some educational debt into the young-family budget.

To me, a big factor in one’s perception of income is whether there is some capacity to earn more should circumstances call for it – could you find work in a more profitable field/employer, could you increase hours, could your spouse earn more money.