Money money money

I have this irrational throw-caution-to-the-wind attitude when I start to conceive of what it would be like to have a large family. It comes in part from my Mom, who is one of my most frugal people I know, but has told me on numerous occasions that she and my Dad didn't worry about the cost of raising children, nor the expenses of college, when they started making babies in the 1950s. My Dad had gotten his undergraduate degree courtesy of the GI bill and my Mom had decided that nursing and teaching weren't for her and taken an office job after a year in college, so neither of them accrued much, if any, debt at the hands of higher education. They were young, and perhaps they were naive, but things worked out for them and their family. My Dad found success in his career and my Mom raised five children who now hold a combined 12 higher degrees. Am I wishing on a star expecting that the same good fortune could bless my growing family?

For today's entry I am going to select three "cost of raising a child" calculators on the internet, fill in a kid count of one, and share the results below in an attempt to get some perspective on what impact kid count has on your pocketbook:

The first calculator I used was called "Cost of Raising Your Child" on Babycenter.com, a site that I perused with some regularity during my first pregnancy, and found to be generally unbiased and informative. The site asks five questions, including the year your child will be born, where you live, your income, type of household, and intended college, before it hits you with the damage. For us, the total for our second baby, poised to be born any day now, came to:
$418,702.

Using the "Cost of Raising Children Calculator," provided by ABC News, I inputed my household type, income range, and age of child, and I came up with a slightly lower number, $308,847, but this only accounted for expenses up to age 18, meaning that college was excluded. The calculator allowed you to input the ages of multiple children, though only up to three (what is the message here? if you have time to calculate cost of children on the web there is a high probability that you don't have more than three kids?), so I gave it a whirl, assuming I had kids aged 1, 3, and 5, and the number I came up with was: $539,708.

The "Baby Cost Calculator" on the Babyzone.com site allowed me to tailor to my own situation a little more. For example, I could input how long I intended to have my child in daycare rather than assuming the costs would continue past kindergarten. The number they gave me was slightly more tame: $164,278 (again, excluding college tuition).

As you can see, the numbers varied significantly, though no matter how you read them, they are big six digit bundles and when you start multiplying them for increased brood size, they only grow (and here I demonstrate some of my exceptional math skills). The college question still puzzles me. Recall my conversation, highlighted in my long initial post on the origins of my kid count fixation, when I visited the helpful representative at T Rowe Price. Her tally for a four-year private college in 2024, when Ben would be packing off for school, was $339,824.

So, I'm left a little stumped, and also a little curious, about who uses these calculators and how accurate they actually are? I need to find some parents with larger families, and gauge their awareness and/or concern about the impending and current costs of family life. The reality is, however, that I don't actually know that many people my age with more than two children, or plans to have more than a couple. I'm going to work on finding some good interview candidates, though, and get some more insight on this topic up here in the next few months. Stay tuned.