I spend a lot of time in my car being annoyed about spending time in my car.
Not long commutes — we chose where we live partly to avoid that. But the kid shuffle. Soccer across the borough. The specialist appointments. The grocery circuit. The errand loop that somehow turns every Saturday into a logistics operation. My husband and I have discussed the cargo bike at least four times. We have discussed moving somewhere where everything is ten minutes away even more. Then we talk ourselves out of it because we like our neighborhood, the kids are settled, and — what — we would be bored?
Here is what is strange about our situation: on paper, we have already dodged the two biggest costs in American family life. Our kids started Pre-K at three — free, thanks to NYC. Before that, grandparents rotated in to help. And our health insurance is heavily subsidized through work. We did not plan this as a strategy. We got lucky and made good choices at the right time.
And I still feel like our life costs more than it should. Not in dollars. In friction.
That is what made me pay attention when I read Vaclav Smil.
What 200 Countries Actually Show
Smil is an energy researcher who has spent fifty years measuring what countries need to give their people good lives. Not surveys about feelings. Hard outcomes: life expectancy, infant mortality, education, nutrition. Across 200 countries. Over decades.
His finding is blunt: every quality-of-life metric stops improving after a certain level of household spending. Beyond that, more money does not buy more life.
The threshold is roughly $55,000 to $65,000 per household in today’s dollars.
The average American household spends $87,000.
But here is the part that actually matters: the reason American households spend so much is not because Americans are luxurious. It is because the American system privately bills you for things other countries handle publicly.
| What American Families Pay For | Typical Annual Cost | What a Dutch Family Pays |
|---|---|---|
| Health insurance | $22,000 | $0 (taxes) |
| Childcare (2 kids under 5) | $25,000-40,000 | $5,000-8,000 |
| School-quality housing premium | +$150K-500K on home | Minimal |
| Second car (layout requires it) | $10,000-12,000 | Often unnecessary |
| College savings | $10,000-15,000/yr | $2,000-4,000/yr |
That is $50,000 to $80,000 per year in structural costs before you buy a single nice thing. It is not a spending problem. It is an infrastructure tax.
Our Situation — And Why It Still Is Not Enough
We have engineered around the two biggest line items on that table. Free Pre-K. Grandparents for the early years. Subsidized health insurance.
And we still spend on premium services — specialized therapists, enrichment programs, the things you pay for when your kid needs something specific and the system does not offer it. Those are real and I would not cut them. That is spending that buys actual life.
But the time cost of our current setup — the driving, the shuttling, the logistics of getting two kids to activities across the city — that is different. That is the structural tax showing up as time instead of dollars. We are paying for a city layout that was not designed for families with two working parents and two kids in different programs in different neighborhoods.
I keep thinking: if everything were within a mile, how many hours a week would we get back? Five? Eight? What would we do with those hours?
That is the question Smil’s data made me take seriously.
The Three Tests
I went through our spending and our time and looked at it through this framework. Not “what can we cut” — that is a budget exercise. Instead: what is paying for actual life, and what is paying for a life that is badly arranged?
Test 1: The Car
A philosopher named Ivan Illich calculated the real speed of a car — not highway speed, but total miles divided by every hour you devote to it, including the hours you work to pay for it, the hours in traffic, at the mechanic, at the DMV. The answer for the average American: under five miles per hour. Walking speed.
The car does not save you time. It converts your time into money, converts the money into a machine that sits parked 95% of its life, and gives you back motion at pedestrian pace.
One car for a family in a city — often necessary. Two cars — that is $8,000 to $12,000 per year. Over twenty years at 7% returns: $350,000 to $525,000.
Test 2: The Square Footage
The average American home is 2,300 square feet. European families with the same quality of life average 1,000 to 1,400. Every extra 200 square feet costs $150 to $250 per month in mortgage, taxes, heating, cooling, maintenance, and furnishing.
If you are carrying 600 square feet you walk through but do not live in — a guest room that is really a storage room, a formal dining room you use twice a year, a basement that collects boxes — that is $5,000 to $9,000 per year for rooms that store dust.
Test 3: The Radius
This is the one that hit me. When school, grocery, work, and kids’ activities are within a two-mile radius, your life runs on a different operating system. Errands take fifteen minutes, not an hour. You do not need the second car. Saturday stops being a logistics day. You walk places and accidentally get exercise.
The “move somewhere boring where everything is close” option is not boring. It is engineered. And it costs $20,000 to $30,000 less per year — mostly in time and transportation you no longer need.
What This Does to Your Number
A default American family in a major metro:
- Annual spending: $130,000
- FIRE number at 25x: $3.25 million
- Years to save it (putting away $50K/year at 7%): ~26 years
Same family, same city, life redesigned around the three tests:
- Annual spending: $80,000
- FIRE number at 25x: $2.0 million
- Years to save it (putting away $80K/year at 7%): ~15 years
Eleven fewer years of working. Not from earning more. Not from a better portfolio. From arranging your life so it needs less fuel.
And the research — across 200 countries, across decades of hard measurement — says you will not notice the difference in any outcome that matters. Same health. Same education for your kids. Same life expectancy. Probably higher satisfaction, because you got a decade back.
What I Am Actually Doing About It
I want to be honest: I have not made all these changes. I have the cargo bike bookmarked. We still drive to soccer. We still have the “should we just move” conversation every few months without resolving it.
But I have stopped thinking of our spending as a budget problem. It is a design problem. The money follows the design. Fix the design and the money sorts itself out.
Most of us built our lives on default settings. Picked a neighborhood, added a car, enrolled the kids, and layered expenses on top of each other without ever stepping back to ask whether the underlying architecture made sense. The defaults in America are expensive — not because we are wasteful, but because the system was built to push costs onto households.
You cannot change the system. But you can stop running your life on its default settings.
The Enough Number Calculator will show you what your household actually needs once you strip the structural tax. The Real Hourly Rate Calculator will show you what each hour of your life costs after the overhead. Between those two numbers is the answer to the question I keep circling: is my life working for me, or am I just working for my life?
The most expensive thing about your life is not what you buy. It is how the whole thing is built.