Nah, I get you.

The part most people miss is that there's this absolutely huge list of responsible you have as an adult (and especially as a parent), and it's all incredibly expensive.

When I was finishing college I had a friend who landed a job where his salary was going to be $80k. I was making $30k, and I remember thinking that if I ever made that much money I'd just keep living my same lifestyle and save the other half, and I'd be able to retire at age 40, or something.

Except lifestyle creep is real. And I don't even mean the way you get accustomed to nice things (I'm still rocking the same car I was driving when I was in grad school). It's stuff like "Hey, I think we can afford to have kids now" and "We really should move to a better school district, even if the houses are more expensive there" and "Now that we have kids we should look into getting life insurance, and we need to start putting money into a college fund for them."

Then there's saving for my own future. Like a lot of people, we were broke in our 20s, so we didn't really put anything away for retirement, which means that now we're saving aggressively. Between our 401(k)s and stocks, were probably saving about $70k per year. That seems huge, but again like most people we're want to maintain our current lifestyle, and we're playing catch up on our savings. And we're hoping to retire early, at 55 (or wherever our youngest finishes college), which means we need to have an extra big pile of money if we want it to last.

Also with kids comes increased costs for everything: if we go on vacation, that's 4 plane tickets and a room for 4 people (and my kids are a boy and girl at ages where they're not really comfortable sleeping in the same bed anymore). If we go out to eat, I'm buying 4 dinners (this is actually where I notice inflation -- even somewhere dumb like Applebee's is $100 after tip). Going to the movies means 4 tickets -- $60 before popcorn or anything like that.

Those are all luxuries, sure, but they're not these lavish, unreasonable things; plenty of people go on vacations or out to dinner, or to the movies. Like I said, really, I feel like the biggest actual luxury that we have is that I don't need to care about the price of mundane things. I compare at the shelf to make sure I'm not overpaying, but I never have to look at my bank account to see if I can afford something.