Not the original person you were responding to, but i read your post and couldn't help to think its a little detached from what I've experienced. First off your income is much larger than the average, the average Mainer makes 36k a year, households 63k, so you taking home over 65k after taxes, health insurance, and retirement makes you much wealthier than your average Mainer. I know 10k-20k doesn't seem much but it adds up over time and giving you opportunities others cannot.

Secondly getting a house in southern Maine for under 350k is gonna be a struggle. Sure you'll find some houses for 300k but they either require a lot of repairs, or you'll find yourself in a bidding war and the price will end up near the 350-400k anyways. For the numbers below I took a 300k house in Ogunquit for the numbers.

So lets run these numbers for the average Mainer to see what it looks like.

Income - $5,416

Taxes* - $1,300

Home - $1,990

Utilities - $200 (low estimate for a home)

Groceries - $400 (Very small for a family of 3, and the price keeps rising)

Health Insurance - $200-800$ (depending on your job and the family plan)

Child care - $1000 (your estimate cost)

And we've already run out of money for the average Mainer, and we haven't gotten to phone bills, car bills, gas, car insurance, emergencies, retirement, basic needs, and everything else.

Now I know you can say don't buy that much house on that income, but the alternative is renting, which wouldn't be that much cheaper short term and much more expensive the the long run.

You might say then move to place with a lower cost of living, but these either farther away from family (who can bring down child care expenses), or from better playing jobs which then makes the cheaper cost of living still hard to maintain. The other expenses, I'm not sure how you get around them.

You keep saying "live below your means", but I can help to notice your earning almost three times the average Mainer, and idk if you know what that would mean in todays world.

And the train hit his car so hard it "pushed into the restaurant’s parking lot, where it collided with three other vehicles that were parked", but he was still allowed by emt's to drive it to the hospital?

Bridle Path in kennebunk, I'd park off western Ave.