1) The costs are heavily front-loaded. This makes the opportunity cost enormous. 2) I think we paid about $10k per birth, total. That’s not nothing. 3) Health

1) The costs are heavily front-loaded. This makes the opportunity cost enormous. 2) I think we paid about $10k per birth, total. That’s not nothing. 3) Health insurance goes up. Kids are cheap but it’s still a couple thousands more per year. Plus hundreds to low-thousands per year in other healthcare spending per year (averaged—we’ve had $5k years and $1k years) 4) … Except having kids is a reverse lottery ticket for each one, and the healthcare & related costs could end up being “most of your money, forever”, if you’re unlucky. 5) Childcare costs are either $500-$thousands per kid per month (unless you’ve got relatives who are cool doing that all the time) or the entirety of one parent’s foregone compensation for the same span (five to six figures a year for most folks) 6) Housing. Unless you can’t afford it, you’re gonna find it very hard to settle for cheap housing in a bad school district. The premium in our area for a good vs. mediocre (not even the awful, horribly dangerous ones!) district is about 35-40% for a similar house. That’s… a fuckton of money, and the difference is likely to be 100% financed for folks around having-kids ages. Everything else is basically negligible compared to healthcare, daycare, and housing, or can be made very cheap with minimal sacrifice. Child related expenses were often over 50% of everything leaving our bank account, for months on end, when our kids were younger.