[dradernh]

Originally Posted by XutvJet

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.

Yeah, because they weren't my kids, I'm in no position to respond with hard data.

The family I'm referencing had a stay-at-home mother who had had a successful outside sales career in tech and a father working in a very volatile industry with years of very high wages and years of much lower wages after over-50% pension give-backs. The kids went to public school in an expensive NH town well-known for its schools and high property taxes, they didn't go to $30K summer camps, and they weren't driving their own cars to school after becoming old enough to earn their drivers licenses.

If I had to guess, having lived close-by in the same town leads me to think it was the additional cost of a home and eighteen years of attendant property taxes in a town that they wouldn't have otherwise lived in that put a significant floor under the overall calculated cost of raising the kids.

I will say this: the parents are super-sharp people and would not have been making numbers up. When I chose to raise the subject, the number was one they'd already calculated for themselves.

FWIW, both kids ended up going to a flagship state university in another state. For them, it was never about Harvard, Princeton, Duke, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, and those schools, although I think the parents were prepared to support that if it was a proper fit for the kids.