I really wouldn't feel bad about that if you are. I am also 1982, and we just had a girl in July. ^{Thanks in advance on the congrats.} We've only lived in our house 18mos. I am, however, eligible to retire in 9yrs. And we have been investing in retirement aggressively now whereas I have been for the last decade and her only recently. We could barely save enough so my wife could be off 8wks with the baby. My employer, however, gave me 6wks paternity which is lucky because they only just started doing that the previous year. Combined, we don't bring that much money IMO. In fact, we got kicked out of the city we're employed in because housing just went insane and it didn't help that the city became the most popular in the nation over night it seemed. We also found a deal we couldn't beat for a great moderate sized home (1700sqft) on a hill overlooking wilderness in the backyard. Not another structure can be seen except for a farm house on a hill. So I'm not too mad about the 1hr commute. My wife and I car pool M-F nearly every week and we only had one car for a very long time to further save money in the variety of forms another car adds to monthly expenses: gas, maintenance, insurance, inspection/registration. We anticipated the need to buy another car once the baby was here and bought one before she came. That actually turned out to be unnecessary. The silver lining of that though was a great find on a high end used car that I didn't initially want to buy but my wife talked me into it. She's so cool. We watch cartoons all the time so this kid raising stuff should be a cinch.