4 ms·

There's a serious lack of awareness in some of these comments of just how dang expensive kids & a family can be. That's not to say that there isn't plenty of p

There's a serious lack of awareness in some of these comments of just how dang expensive kids & a family can be. That's not to say that there isn't plenty of poor financial management going on, but if you have 3 kids you can't just start a 4th side hustle, live in a cardboard box, and put all your money in crypto and then retire in 4 years.

deleted 5y ago
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handrous 5y ago
$1000/m day care per kid (+/- 50% depending on school quality and where you live, though I'm sure it's possible to spend even more than that). Or else whatever wages one parent is giving up to stay home, total, divided by # of kids needing daycare. $500/m, maybe, on healthcare, for kids who aren't particularly sickly and don't have chronic conditions. Family insurance coverage levels this cost out a bit, though each kid increases the likelihood of accidents or illness, which is expensive. Birth cost is likely to hit whatever your max-individual-out-of-pocket cost is, and potentially double that if you time it very poorly. Cost increases to housing and transportation vary a lot but I think $500/m is a fair low-side-of-average guess to put on that. You can technically avoid much of that, but usually only at costs most people won't accept if they can at all afford not to (e.g. sending your kids to bad/dangerous schools). This doesn't scale per-kid like day care does, though. Food and other consumables. Probably looking at $5,000-$15,000 for each birth, unless you spread too much of the pregnancy over two years (if you get all the pre-natal care in one deductible year, and the actual birth in another, that's very bad). This assumes none of the kids are actually sick. Three kids (minimum for statistical above-replacement rate) and we're talking $15,000-$45,000 paid for births, and probably $30,000-40,000/yr while they're young (daycare), dropping to maybe $15,000-$20,000/yr when they're a little older, total, for all three. Food, clothes, incidentals all (very roughly) included. Again, assuming your kids are basically healthy—any chronic illness can add hundreds to thousands per month, easily. Yeah, it's a fuckton of money, and a whole lot of risk on top of what you're nigh-guaranteed to spend. At least you get a tax credit to pay for a small fraction of it. That's nice. Mine are in early grade school or about to enter school. Did a mix of some stay-at-home-parent and some daycare. I reckon we're approaching half a million spent so far, which would have had us well on the way to early retirement. I'm not counting opportunity cost. Way the market's done, that'd be well on the way to a million now. We've taken, like, one of them on a non-long-weekend vacation ever (the others weren't born yet, it's not like we ditched them), and none of them have ever flown anywhere, so we're not spending lavishly on vacations. Public school (so far, anyway). Mostly cheap "activities" (swimming lessons at the community center, stuff like that). We're in a low-cost-of-living area. Having kids took us from guaranteed, comfortable early retirement to... well, frankly I don't expect to be able to stop working until I'm not physically able any more.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

handrous 5y ago

$1000/m day care per kid (+/- 50% depending on school quality and where you live, though I'm sure it's possible to spend even more than that). Or else whatever wages one parent is giving up to stay home, total, divided by # of kids needing daycare. $500/m, maybe, on healthcare, for kids who aren't particularly sickly and don't have chronic conditions. Family insurance coverage levels this cost out a bit, though each kid increases the likelihood of accidents or illness, which is expensive. Birth cost is likely to hit whatever your max-individual-out-of-pocket cost is, and potentially double that if you time it very poorly. Cost increases to housing and transportation vary a lot but I think $500/m is a fair low-side-of-average guess to put on that. You can technically avoid much of that, but usually only at costs most people won't accept if they can at all afford not to (e.g. sending your kids to bad/dangerous schools). This doesn't scale per-kid like day care does, though. Food and other consumables. Probably looking at $5,000-$15,000 for each birth, unless you spread too much of the pregnancy over two years (if you get all the pre-natal care in one deductible year, and the actual birth in another, that's very bad). This assumes none of the kids are actually sick. Three kids (minimum for statistical above-replacement rate) and we're talking $15,000-$45,000 paid for births, and probably $30,000-40,000/yr while they're young (daycare), dropping to maybe $15,000-$20,000/yr when they're a little older, total, for all three. Food, clothes, incidentals all (very roughly) included. Again, assuming your kids are basically healthy—any chronic illness can add hundreds to thousands per month, easily. Yeah, it's a fuckton of money, and a whole lot of risk on top of what you're nigh-guaranteed to spend. At least you get a tax credit to pay for a small fraction of it. That's nice. Mine are in early grade school or about to enter school. Did a mix of some stay-at-home-parent and some daycare. I reckon we're approaching half a million spent so far, which would have had us well on the way to early retirement. I'm not counting opportunity cost. Way the market's done, that'd be well on the way to a million now. We've taken, like, one of them on a non-long-weekend vacation ever (the others weren't born yet, it's not like we ditched them), and none of them have ever flown anywhere, so we're not spending lavishly on vacations. Public school (so far, anyway). Mostly cheap "activities" (swimming lessons at the community center, stuff like that). We're in a low-cost-of-living area. Having kids took us from guaranteed, comfortable early retirement to... well, frankly I don't expect to be able to stop working until I'm not physically able any more.