Living Together On $124K A Year In Portland, Oregon | Millennial Money

Marissa and Jacob Lyda earn a combined income of $124,000 and live in Portland, Oregon. Here's how they split finances as a couple and purchased a home after tackling nearly $90,000 worth of student debt.

Read more about Marissa and Jacob's budget breakdown

The couple, who met at Corban University in Salem, Oregon, and got married in July 2015, paid off all of their student debt in two and a half years, mostly thanks to their living situation. They still paid Marissa’s mom some rent — $200 a month — “but it allowed us to dump almost all of our income, after paying insurance and paying all of our other expenses, to debt,” says Jacob.

After becoming debt-free in 2017, they celebrated with a Caribbean cruise and moved into their own apartment, but their lifestyle didn’t change much. That made it easy to save for a home, adds Jacob: “We were already in a very frugal mindset because we had come off of paying down so much debt.” Rather than upgrading their lifestyle, they redirected the money that previously went toward their loans into a house fund.

In the fall of 2019, after saving a little over $20,000 for the down payment, the couple closed on a $428,000, four-bed, three-bath house in Portland, Oregon. Today, with a baby on the way, they have shifted their financial priorities with a goal of saving a $25,000 emergency fund.

Marissa earns $45,000 a year working as an accounting manager for a non-profit. She works four, 10-hour days — Monday through Thursday — and spends the bulk of Fridays working on her side business, The Budgeting Wife, which has evolved from a blog she started to document the process of paying off student loans into a personal finance brand.

It took a year and a half to start monetizing her platforms, but today she has more than 33,000 subscribers on YouTube and makes about $27,500 a year between The Budgeting Wife and freelance video editing projects. Her business expenses run low: $400 per month. She spends $200 on monthly subscriptions and equipment, and puts $200 toward a business savings account for any big, future purchases she wants to make for her company.

Jacob works in product marketing for a software company and makes $51,500, putting their combined total income at $124,000. They live comfortably, but earning more is “always something to work toward,” says Jacob. “It would be nice, especially since we have one child on the way, and if we decide to have more children.”

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Living Together On $124K A Year In Portland, Oregon | Millennial Money