Quote:
Originally Posted by dradernh
When I suggested to a friend in the mid-00s that raising a child in the upper middle class to age 18 cost $250K in after-tax dollars (a number I'd read in the WSJ a decade earlier), he looked me right in the eye and very quickly brought me up to speed. It wasn't a quarter of a million after-tax dollars any more, he said, it was one-third of a million dollars. Per child. After tax.
Mind you, that's to set the child up to win economically for the rest of his or her life – to be one of the 10%. After that, of course, it's up to the kid to make the grade.
This wasn't a family splashing-out in any visible way, and I didn't ask for a breakdown, but I found that to be a very sobering number. The wife and I were well beyond having kids by then (we chose not to have them decades before), but it did give us an appreciation for what parents wanting their kids to have - not the very best of everything by any means, but a fair shot at most of what our country has to offer - had to pay to make that happen.
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I really don't understand where this math is coming from. My wife and I don't spend $17k/yr or $1400/mo raising our kids. Yes, some months or years are more expensive, but overall, not $17/yr. Not even close. We'd still have the same cars and house if we didn't have kids. My health insurance would only be marginally cheaper.
Seeing that the median household income is around $78k year, and many households have 2 kids, it's hard for me to fathom folks making $120k or less a year are spending $17k/yr raising each child until 17 as this data suggests. I think weathly folks sending their kiddos to day long daycare and private schools are really skewing this number.