A Word of Caution

I've spent a lot of words the last few days on the costs of raising children. You can google "what does it cost to raise a child" and find all kinds of calculations, but the bottom line is that every family has it's own set of values and priorities and therefore spend more or less money than others on different goods and services. I used an example in my last post to demonstrate that having a child did not significantly raise my automobile costs. I did not balance that, however, by pointing out that while many families increase their monthly housing costs by $200 - $300, mine more than doubled. This is because of the priority my husband and I put on everyone having private space and shared space dedicated to different activities.

After rereading my last point, I felt the need to come back to this. While I am an advocate of father's rights (with respect to good fathers being involved in their children's lives), online calculators on several men's sites such as this one are no where near being accurate. My childcare costs, for example, are more than double what is in this table as are several other expenses (as a matter of fact, my son's daycare costs have been double the average tuition cost of state colleges). Here are some other links to consider if you want to actually calculate the cost of raising your children, but I strongly suggest you critically analyze each one for how well it actually represents YOUR life (as well as what year the calculator was created):

http://www.babycenter.com/costofchild/
http://www.bankrate.com/brm/calc/raiseChild.asp
http://www.yourmoneyyourlife.org/mk1.html