Our family for the "Life Happens" experience was a part of the upper-middle class. It consisted of an adult female, an adult male, and their 16 year old son. Both parents were lawyers with a joint income of $140,000 per year. Their son was expecting to graduate high school early and do some traveling before attending college. They had one car paid for and a payment on a second. They had $10,000 in savings and were living in a 3 bedroom house.
During the budgeting process I wanted to be sure that our family didn't go above and beyond what was necessary in most categories. We settled with no cable TV, a Honda Civic, and no budgeted entertainment costs. The reasoning behind this is that I really wanted to make sure that our family had plenty to donate to charities and those less fortunate than ourselves, much how I hope to live my own life. At times I felt a bit disgusted with the gross amount of excess that we had while other groups were struggling to make their ends meet; after our expenses ($30,000 of which went to donations) we still had more than $69,000 left over.
Due to the overabundance of money our family held, no decision was really difficult at all, there was nothing that we couldn't afford.
*UPDATE*
Our random event card was a $200 tax refund. Needless to say, this wasn't anything that made or broke our budget. We had no need for this extra money, so we simply added it to our savings.
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