toddlerspit

A number of my wonderful friends are thinking of having kids.  To the last, all would make amazing parents.  To the last, all have a variety of concerns about what it means to have kids.  Some are gay, some have health problems, some are just weighing all the options.

And all have mentioned the cost of having kids.  In the past, I’ve kind of pooh-poohed this.  My opinion was, if you’re ready to have kids, just go for it.  Don’t let money get in your way.  In other words, if most of us waited to have kids until we’d saved up enough money to support them, not too many of us would be having kids.  That was certainly our experience–having kids has been forcing us to get some other financial ducks in a row, but we certainly haven’t been bankrupted by them.

Or have we?  I was curious to find out just how much having kids is costing us.  Because we keep really detailed records of our expenditures every month, I went back over the last year’s records to check this out.  A couple of things became really clear.  First, these numbers are very context-specific.  In other words, your numbers will vary based on how many people are parenting, where you’re located, whether one, two, or three of the parents decide to work, and so on.  I’ve tried to be specific about our particulars to give you a sense of the variables.

Second, kids cost money, even when you do things on the cheap.  Being middle class with at least two incomes is the only way we could swing it.  The money we spend on daycare alone could probably get us out of debt in two years.   

The numbers below are pretty accurate because of our record-keeping, but where it made sense to do so, I rounded off to the nearest hundred.  So, here is what we’ve got:

1.  Daycare.  No surprise here:  This is far and a way the biggest expense we have, one that has doubled since Nolie’s arrival in August.  Next year’s number will be even higher because we’ll pay daycare for both kids for every month of the year, and Addie is in preschool now, which is more expensive than a home daycare (where Nolie currently is). 

Note:  my schedule is flexible, and Eric’s work allows him every other Friday off.  As a result, both kids are in daycare only three full days a week (sometimes less).  So this number includes 20-25 hours a week for both kids because I work evenings and odd weekend hours.  It also includes the cost for gym daycare (back when I was going to the gym), gratuities for our daycare provider, and the occasional night out, which was almost never–we’re homebodies, for the most part.  Finally, we have limited friends/family to use as babysitting resources–most of Eric’s family is in San Diego, mine’s in Idaho.  So we don’t get much free daycare that other folks might get if they live near grandparents, for example.

Total:  $5400

2.  Groceries.  This one is harder to calculate, because we didn’t keep track of what exact expenses were for Addie and Nolie, and which were ours.  However, on average, we spent $1100 a month average on groceries.  Before you get all indignant at that number, let me tell you that we are now down to $800 a month because of some lifestyle changes we’ve made.  But $1100 was the number for most of 2006.  My guess is that out of that, approximately $200 a month went to stuff for the kids (diapers, food, baby wash, etc.).  I breastfed both babies until around 6 months, so that saved a lot on formula, which is ridiculously expensive (especially when your kids are lactose intolerant and have to drink soy formula.  Argh).

Total:  $2400

3.  Medical copays.  We are members of the lucky club of Americans who actually have health insurance, and we belong to an HMO, so we’re primarily on the copay system.  This number is what it is because of a couple of trips to the E.R. for Addie, an ambulance ride, and Nolie’s birth.  Then, all the little doctor visits over time added up.  So, we had very reasonable copays, but they accumulated over time.

Total:  $1400

4.  Clothing:  My kids are rarely dressed in designer duds.  They puke and poop all over everything anyway, so why bother?  In fact, almost everything either one of them wears is a hand-me-down, a gift, or from the thrift store.  The one thing I do spend money on is shoes, because Addie is very picky about what she’ll keep on her feet, and she’ll wear one pair until they are falling apart.  Another note:  Nolie is a girl.  That means that she is now wearing all of Addie’s baby clothes.  If she had been a boy, he probably couldn’t have worn all of Addie’s hand-me-downs (even though boys look cute in pink), and our clothing costs no doubt would have increased.  The number below is mostly maternity clothes for me.  I had Addie in spring and Nolie in the heat of the summer, so not all of my old maternity clothes translated to the new pregnancy. 

Total:  $600

5.  Entertainment:  This number includes eating out (we now have to pay for Addie to take one bit of something and decide she doesn’t like it in a restaurant), trips to the zoo or museums, memberships, and so on.  Granted, we probably would have spent entertainment money on something else if we didn’t have kids, but I’m trying to be thorough here.  I’m sure there are ways to reduce this cost (don’t eat out, don’t go out).  But if you never take your kid to the zoo or for ice cream, why are you a parent?

Total:  $650

6.  Travel:  We took Addie to San Diego once to see Eric’s parents, and to Idaho twice.  She’s now over the age of two, so we pay for her plane ticket.  My family does offer to help out with tickets when we come, but even with that, we paid almost a grand to fly her to see her family.  I don’t know what in hell we’ll do once Nolie turns two and we have to pay for her ticket.  Hide in our basement for the rest of our lives, I guess.

Total:  $800

7.  College Savings:  We put $50 a month in a pre-tax account for Addie’s college, and set up one for Nolie in November.  One of her grandparents also has an account saved up for her.

Total:  $700

8.  Gear:  We probably paid out for a lot more stuff when Addie was born, but I saved all that stuff, so we didn’t have to buy much for Nolie’s arrival.  Still, we did need a double stroller, some humidifiers, and a truckload of stuff for potty training.  We bought most of this used from Craig’s List.  I think gear is not something new parents need to worry too much about–you’ll get a lot as gifts or hand-me-downs, or can procure quality stuff used pretty easily.  And a lot of the crap they try to sell you as new parents you don’t really need (of course, you probably won’t know this until you’re done having kids).

Total:  $240

9.  Haircuts:  Addie’s hair grows incredibly slowly, so we don’t get it cut often.  When we do, we go to Supercuts.

Total:  $50

10.  Birthday parties/gifts and Christmas:  We keep Addie pretty well hidden away, but she’s still managed to make a few friends and get invited to a few parties.  And she had one birthday of her own (we only bought her one gift, by the way.  We figured she’d get plenty of stuff from her grandparents, and she did.  Same with Christmas).  Still, we spent some cash on gifts for other kids and on things like new Christmas stockings.

Total:  $125

11.  Having Nolie:  The $100 copay for her birth is factored into the health insurance number above, but we also paid to have a doula (a birthing assistant) at Nolie’s birth, which was money very well spent (Nolie shot out so fast the doula practically had to catch her).  I also needed some medications and other aids when pregnant and in the weeks postpartum.  These were luxuries but made that whole wretched experience more pleasant.  The cost of a doula in my area is $400-800, but varies depending on where you live.

Total:  $900

So, how much did having two kids (one only since August) cost us this year?

Grand Total:  $13,265.  Holy God.  About 20% of our take-home pay.

Can you do it for cheaper?  Probably (we probably could have).  Maybe you wouldn’t have a doula at your birth, or don’t need to travel to see family.  Maybe you live in a part of the country where things don’t cost quite so much.

But maybe you couldn’t do it cheaper.  Maybe your kid will have to be in daycare 5 days a week.  Maybe he or she will have health problems our kid didn’t have, God forbid.  Maybe you will decide your kid has to be dressed in fancy new clothes.  I don’t know.

And I’m sure there are things I’m not considering.  I’m sure there is a tax benefit to having kids–because I own a small business, I can write off daycare expenses, and you get a tax credit for every child you have.  So you should factor that into your calculations.  I also want to be clear that I recognize our enormous privilege here:  we both have jobs we love that pay us decent (though not excessive) wages; we have health coverage; we have 401ks.  We have some debt, but on the whole we’re in pretty good shape financially.

Of course (necessary disclaimer here), my kids are not quantifiable, not reducible to numbers.  The joy and depth they bring to my life is incalculable, so this post is really just an exercise, something to notice and be aware of.  I suppose that’s what I would tell my friends who want kids, now, if they make enough and have some left over:  yes, do it.  It will make your life so rich.  But it will definitely make your pocketbook poorer.

Eric and I bought our first house in November, 2002, just a few short months after we got married.  I had a tiny (I mean TINY) little slice of stock in Albertson’s grocery–I think almost every one in Idaho did, at one point–that I convinced my parents to let me cash out.  We combined this with some of the money we got for wedding gifts, used it for a down payment, and moved in.

The house was a wreck.  It had been empty for eighteen months while it was on the market, and some squatters had lived in it for a while.  Before that, it had been a rental with out-of-state landlords, the same landlords who refused to accept any decent offer on the house, listing it only “as-is.”  Someone had come in before the house went on the market and had sprayed paint all over the walls (and hardwood floors) and had put in the cheapest carpet imaginable.  My guess is that this same person told the out-of-state landlords that he or she had “fixed the place up,” which also meant stripping it of any and all fixtures in the house.  There was no kitchen, only an empty room with one cabinet and a tiny little sink.  There was linoleum everywhere that there wasn’t crappy carpet.  There is no garage and the basement is unfinished.

But, we bought it.  At the time, the house seemed huge to us, and we didn’t have kids, so fixing up the place sounded like fun (yes, I realize how completely insane this sounds, now).  Plus, the house was in a “low-income” neighborhood, so we got an excellent loan at a very low rate with no mortgage insurance.  We have done a lot of the work on the house, we make an extra mortgage payment every year, and our neighborhood is slowly but surely gentrifying, so we’ve built up some good equity and the value of the home has substantially increased.

Now it’s 2007, and our lives look a lot different than they did in 2002.  We’ve got two precious babies, and we both work in cities a half hour away.  Though we don’t accumulate a ton of material stuff compared to a lot of folks, the house is feeling small to us, and the drives to work are getting to be more of a hassle.  It takes me an hour to drop off both kids at their respective daycares in the morning and to get to work; it takes an hour to get back to Denver and pick them up.  In addition to paying for the gas of the drive, the girls are in daycare an additional 6 hours each week while I drive back and forth to work.  All told, we guess this adds up to an extra $200 a month in gas and daycare.

If we were to stay, we’d need to build a garage and have the basement refinished.  We definitely don’t have the capital to do either, so these would have to be long-term plans.  In the meanwhile, we’re outgrowing our space.

These reasons alone would be good enough motivation to consider to moving to Golden, where I work, or to Louisville, where Eric works.  I teach environmental studies, and thinking about global warming and peak oil is giving me hives, so it would be good if we could get down to one commute.  Since I’m usually the caregiver to take the girls and pick them up, we think it might make more sense to move to Golden.  Both cities are suburbs, but Louisville is, I don’t know, a little more suburban.  Golden feels just a little more city, or closer to Denver, at least.

But I have mixed feelings about all this.  I was calling daycares in Golden yesterday to arrange visits so we can get on waiting lists for next fall, and I started feeling weepy.  I love Addie’s preschool, and I love Miss Debbie, who watches Nolie.  I love our pediatrician.  I love living within walking distance of Denver’s biggest park, and the zoo, and museums, and restaurants (even though we don’t go out anymore).  I love living near downtown.  And we have put a lot of work into this old pit.  I have some nostalgia about it, too.

And, of course, there’s the market, the market, the market.  Everyone has an opinion about whether or not we can even sell this thing, and for how much.  We want to sell it for enough to pay off our home equity loan and to garner a decent down payment on a new place (which will be more expensive than what we’re in now, but also substantially bigger).  If we can do this–and I think we can–we’ll just about break even financially every month (because of the savings we’ll have in credit payments, daycare, and gas, and given the increases in the mortgage and utilities).

There’s so many variables.  Will our house sell?  For how much?  Will we find the right house for us in Golden?  Will we like it there?  What if the house doesn’t sell?  Will we decide to stay?  Or should we just find another place in Denver?  What if one of us loses a job and then we’re stuck in a suburb to which we have no ties?

I’m realizing more and more that finances are not just numbers–they are deeply emotional issues, and interwoven tightly with who we are, what we value, and how we want to live.  But, as one of my mentors reminded me last December, “You can’t plan for disaster.”  Instead, I think we’ll try to plan for the life that allows us to be happiest and most fulfilled, and hope we make the right choices.

 Today is Christmas preparation day.  I have a gajillion papers to grade by Monday, but today, December 8, belongs to old Saint Nick.  Addie’s at school, so Nolie will be helping me to address a bunch of xmas cards (look for yours in the mail soon) and to finalize shopping plans.

The thing is, I’m in a simplifyin’ kind of mood.  Maybe it’s the fact that we’re planning on trying to get out of this trash heap some time this spring, so I’ve been randomly packing up some clutter, and taking things to Goodwill.  Maybe it’s that, like tons of other folks out there, I’m tired of going into thousands of dollars worth of debt every season (part of which is the small fortune we spend on plane tickets), which we barely get paid off before the next Christmas rolls around.  Maybe I’m just feeling oppressed by stuff and delighted by non-stuff-type things, like being around my kids, or writing on this blog, or doing yoga.  I don’t know, really.

On a couple of my favorite blogs, like The Simple Dollar and Get Rich Slowly and Parenthacks, folks have been posting good articles on how to decrease mindless spending and increase meaningful creating and sharing.  Some of the tips are obvious, but maybe a little hard to implement, such as encouraging your family to draw names, deciding to make all of your gifts, having a giftless Christmas, or making donations in someone’s name instead of giving them a “gift-gift.” 

We did this with my mom’s side of the family.  All of us drew names for stockings we would fill.  This makes me happy–it will be nice to focus on small gifts that will surprise and delight and that hopefully won’t cost too much to be opened.  Still, I know my mom is going to get lots of unstocking gifts, especially for the kids, so it’s hard not to feel that we need to have extra gifts, too.  I can hear her, now, though–she really doesn’t want us to spend our money on her, so maybe we’ll have to try to heed that voice.

My dad’s side of the family is trickier.  Because we fly home for Christmas, it’s difficult to take a bunch of huge presents with us.  We can ship things, of course.  But because we live far from our family and don’t see them often, it’s also hard to know what to get them.  What do they already have?  What do they need?  So we usually end up getting gift certificates, and they often get them for us.  Somehow, though, we’re in a gift certificate competition now, where the amounts increase every year, certainly beyond what everyone can afford.  But who will be the first to back down, and give a more reasonable amount?  Hard to say.

And the gift certificates make my stepmom roll her eyes (you know you do, Gloria!).  I think they seem like the easy way out.  And they probably are.  So maybe I’ll think on that today as I’m figuring out what to get that side of the family.  I will say this:  the nice thing about the gift certificate is that it fits everyone.  My sister has three kids, and I’m pretty bad about tracking their ages, so I’m sure I’ve purchased a lot of age-inappropriate stuff in the past.  Again, though, maybe a different sort of effort needs to be made here.

We agreed with Steve and Julie that we wouldn’t exchange grown-up gifts this year–only stuff for the kids.  I think this is great.  We grown-ups don’t need any more stuff, certainly, but we can get some goodies for the babes.  The key, of course, will be to refrain from sending grown-up gifts, right?  Because if one side sends a grown-up gift, then the whole cycle of guilt and buying begins again.  Restraint is key in these situations, and it’s not easy to implement.

I was guilty of breaking the pact a few years ago.  We made an arrangement with Eric’s dad and stepmom not to exchange gifts, and then we ended up giving them a big, framed photo of Addie.  Trust-breaker.  Not cool.  Especially because I was the one who initiated the no-gift-giving idea, which I think was hard for Phil and Ubi to swallow–I think they wanted to exchange gifts, and it makes them happy to do so.  So, I blew it.

Are you getting the picture?  We have so many separate families to think about and buy for.  When younger, one of the few perks of being children of divorced parents was that you got twice the gifts.  Now that we’re older, though, we have twice the gifts to buy.  Luckily, we also have twice as many people in our life to love and be loved by, so it worked out, thank goodness.  It’s just a lot of pressure to judge yourself and your relationships by what you can afford to get someone.

Eric’s susceptible to this holiday madness, too.  For a few years now, he’s left the gift buying to me, and he’s always unhappy at unwrapping time because he feels I haven’t spent enough on folks compared to what they’ve spend on us.  This make him feel bad, and make me feel terrible, like a greedy little gnome taking bites off of everyone else’s mushroom.  I feel like saying, “Well, you buy the gifts, then!”  But then the gifts wouldn’t be bought, or we’d spend thousands of dollars.  And I don’t feel like either is a great option.  Still, this year, he’s responsible for buying for his family (within a set budget that both of us agreed on), and I’m buying for mine.  Keep your fingers crossed.

Do I sound ungrateful?  Stingy?  Resentful?  I suppose there’s some truth in that.  Maybe it’s unfair that now we’re comfortable and have most of what we need that I all of a sudden decide this gift-giving thing is for the birds.  But it’s not that I don’t want to give.  I enjoy being crafty, so I like making gifts and giving them to others.  I like finding good deals on something I know someone else will love.  I just wish there wasn’t pressure to do this at one particular time of year.  Wouldn’t it be great if, some time in the heat of June, I found a beautiful vase that I knew my sister would love.  I wrap it in festive paper and attach a Merry Christmas card.  Because I am thinking of her then, and found the perfect gift then.  Wouldn’t that be great?  Wouldn’t it be great it I stopped putting all this pressure on everything?  Wouldn’t it be great if I changed my expectations and let go of everyone else’s reactions?  Stopped projecting my feelings of inadequacy on to them? 

But for now, Nolie and I will spend today figuring out how to keep these balls in the air, and we will address Christmas cards (which I love to do).  And we’ll try to make decisions from a place of love and gratitude.  Hopefully our sentiments will hit their mark.

Eric and I try to keep to a budget.  We really do.  We keep a very detailed Excel spreadsheet that tracks every penny in and out each month, and we have certain limits on categories like groceries and eating out and babysitting.  We’ve been doing this for about a year, and though we still have a lot of debt, it’s slowly inching its way down.

Very slowly.  Because for the past few months, we’ve been paying a small ransom in copays.  Trips to the doctor here, ambulance rides there; stays in the hospital here, emergency room visits there.  It adds up, you know?  And we are some of the lucky ones who have insurance.  I can’t imagine what it would be like not to.  I suppose we’d be a whole lot more careful about when we went to the doctor and when we didn’t.  But maybe we’d be sick a lot more, or for a lot longer.

I don’t mean to complain about money, especially when you consider this, which suggests we are the 29,907,929th richest people in the world.  That maybe doesn’t sound that great, but it actually means we are in the top 1% wealthiest people on the planet.  So, perspective.

Still, it would be nice for the family not to be sick for a while.  To have everyone stay out of the doctor’s office, so we could spend our money on eating skillets at our favorite breakfast joint, Hotcakes, or so we could pay off some more credit card debt.  I’ve been wishing that Eric and the kids and I could just be well.

I didn’t even think about the animals.

Last night I wrapped up a steamy session of Windsor Pilates (oh, my aching Powerhouse!) and got ready for bed.  Eric was out playing a gig, so I was on dog duty.  I was cursing Burley under my breath for needing to go outside every five minutes when I noticed, Hey, Burley is needing to outside every five minutes.  Turns out he was going out to puke.  

He’s done this before.  He eats something he shouldn’t, something a well-intentioned neighbor has perhaps thrown over the fence for him, like a chicken bone, say.  Then, he’s sick to his stomach.  So he goes outside, eats some grass or leaves to make himself throw up, then throws up and feels better.  When this happens, it usually doesn’t last too long.  But last night was different.  The poor dog was going out and horking all night long, and he was, well, hang dog this morning, in a big way.  Addie and I got home from a friend’s birthday party, and Burley was barely able to stand.  

I won’t lie.  Burley is often a pain in my whatsit.  He barks a lot and has to be in the middle of everything and sheds like a mo-fo.  Jeez, does he shed.  But when I saw that poor, sick dog today, my heart just about broke in two, and I made Eric take him to the vet, even though it was a Sunday, and emergency animal care makes you pay through the nose.  The animal hospital:  otherwise known as Usury-Is-Us.  Otherwise known as Give-Us-Your-First-Born.com.  Otherwise known as “It’s cheaper to euthanize your pet than to get an x-ray here.”  But I made Eric take him anyway, because that’s what you do when you have a member of your family who is sick, and you have it in your power to make them better.

So, $250 later, Burley is back home.  All he had was a tummy ache.  I’m glad we took him in–glad we can afford to make sure he wasn’t poisoned or really sick or diseased.  But, man.  $250 could have bought a lot of skillets at Hotcakes.