[ceejayoz]

> You forget that the college expense is temporary while the taxes are forever.

I see you're unfamiliar with American student loans.

> And Germany still makes you get private insurance for medical.

We spend about double what you do for healthcare, inclusive of both private and public spending. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:OECD_health_expendit...

> What were you doing with your money in those other years?

An enormous amount of it has been going to healthcare for about twenty years now. This wasn't our first year of such costs.

[hparadiz]

I am very familiar with American student loans. I paid my 40k off in about 11 months by keeping my spending down that year. It was easy. I don't want to pay 15% of my income forever just because you can't budget. Also frankly your kids should be paying their own way through college. That's a nice gift you're giving them but it's 100% a discretionary expense and is basically you saying "I have so much money I can simply gift it to my kids". Shit I wish I had that.

[ceejayoz]

> That's a nice gift you're giving them…

I never said I was - I'll certainly try to help where I can. I don't have that kind of money; see aforementioned healthcare costs! They're gonna need loans, it's probably gonna be quite a bit more than $40k, and I'm pretty dubious in the current job market that they're gonna have $40k in discretional annual income on the other end.

> I don't want to pay 15% of my income forever just because you can't budget.

And I don't want to go bankrupt from ever-rising medical costs, but here we are.