I keep hearing that the quality of life is worth the "consumer" down grade. Right now we have two cars and enough money every month to buy plenty of groceries, pay all the bills, save a little bit every month and still have some extra to go out at least twice a week (once for breakfast, once for dinner) and to a movie if we wanted. So there are truthfully things I would be giving up---like going for coffee at the local cafe every morning, digital cable, cell phones and the like.
Dude. You will be able to do that on 40k per year, no probem, if you spend wisely, budget your expenses, and are money smart. Easily. I've been doing that with a husband and two kids for a lot, lot, lot, less than 40k.
Your mortgage/rent will be a factor and a chunk of your budget. You need to think about how you want to approach it. We have lived in council housing, which has financially helped us - a 3 bed house for very low rent. It can be a short term solution towards you guy figuring out where you want to live and how you are going to do it.
You may not need two cars, depending on where you are living. 7 years here and we still don't have a car, and get around fine. Oh, of course, it would be better to have a car, but the point is, you don't need (nessecarily) need one, let alone two (and you mightn't have a place to park either). So keep that in mind - that is one of those things you won't know until you get here. Belfast, where I live, may be weird though, as part of its public transport is provided by black-market taxis, private taxi firms in local estates run by ex-prisoners (for the most part), and they are dirt cheap. That combined with good bus and rail means you can easily get by, even with kids, without a car - though it can of course be admittedly a pain in the ass. If you are cutting corners, you make trade offs.
Going out for coffee or going out twice a week, well, I have found that you are limited in your choice of options unless you are always going into town. Perhaps that's the neighborhood I live in, but the culture of restaurants/cafes we have in the states has not caught on here (yet). Service is not the best and to be frank nor is cleanliness, even in the better restaurants. (Of course that is hit or miss). But I am thinking if you like to go to say, your local diner, every week, it might not be the same here. Unless you live next to a cafe, coffee out every morning is probably not gonna happen. And once the baby arrives, you'll be fairly housebound anyway, even with the best intentions.
Cable tv, internet and mobile phones are easily doable as well. For example, what we would mark as 'entertainment budget' goes to the TV & internet package. We don't go out pubbing or out to eat very much and almost never to the movies (especially not together - babysitters are hard to come by for us on the day we'd like the ones we have to sit for us, lol), rarely to concerts and we don't buy a lot of dvds or cds. So our entertainment budget is getting the biggest cable TV package, because we are home to watch it (tho we skip the movie and sports option because we never ended up watching any of them), and we get a faster internet speed because we use it all the time.
All of this is to say you trade off what you want for what you need, what you use for what you don't, and sometimes the difference in culture makes those choices for you. The short answer is that yes, you will be able to manage well enough on 40K over here. How you do it you honestly won't know until you are here.
