Welcome to the Making Margin podcast! Greenway’s team is here to discuss common financial mistakes and to help you navigate them.
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Today’s topic is all about the cost of having and raising kids:
- The estimated cost of raising a child from birth through age 17 is $233,610 -- or as much as almost $14,000 annually, the Department of Agriculture says. That’s the average for a middle-income couple with two children. It’s a bit more expensive in urban parts of the country, and less so in rural areas.
- Up to a third of the total cost is housing, accounting for 26 to 33 percent of the total expense of raising a child. USDA comes up with those numbers by calculating the average cost of an additional bedroom - an approach the department says is probably conservative, because it doesn’t account for those families who pay more to live in communities that have better schools or other amenities for children.
- According to the University of New Hampshire: Child care expenses can be a large portion of family income. The average share of income spent on child care among families with young children who pay for child care is 8.8 percent. Nationwide, 26.8 percent of these families, or 1.4 million, spend more than 10 percent of their income on child care
Discussion topics:
- Do these stats deter people from having kids?
- Our own childcare story, as a kid and as a parent
- Why is it discussed so much less frequently than college expense?
- How do we help people plan for it?
Take Away: Kids are expensive. Planning for those expenses can dramatically help.
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