Kids are not that expensive. You do not have to send them to college, you just have to love them, teach them, care for them. Sure you will have to buy more food, and you might need a bigger house/apartment.
My opinion only- For the middle class going to college is not seen as optional. Doing the same expensive activities as the other middle class kids is not seen as optional. There are millions of working class people in the US with good lives, but most middle class people would never seriously consider not following middle class norms.
Not paying for your kid's college doesn't mean they don't go to college. I went to a very respectable state university with loans that I paid off within 3 years after graduating. I've worked at some of the top companies in the world. It's very attainable and not unreasonable.
Totally agree. You can graduate from your state school with <$100k in debt easily. You can get much lower debt levels if you don't stay in the expensive dorms (with expensive meal plans) after your freshman year, if you plan ahead and graduate in 4 years, and if you apply for many local/state scholarships (in my experience the national scholarships are a waste of time).
As an engineering student, you can also get paid internships each summer (can often pay >$10k) or can be a paid research assistant for a professor during the year for ~10 hours week (pays for groceries each week).
Or you can go in the Air Force, be a "civilian in uniform" (Air Force is really easy), and have Uncle Sam pay for your degree at night while you get free room and board, free meals, free medical and dental. It's an option for those people not opposed to military service. The AF really is an easy row to hoe. Personal experience. Show up with a clean uniform, good attitude, and everything is easy peasy lemon squeezy. My military service paid for my own degree. Nothing says crappy life like emerging from university behind the power curve because you're in massive debt, paying back student loans while struggling to pay rent, medical costs, transportation costs, ad astra... Start your working career not in debt. Just my 0.02.
Editing to say that if you make the military a career, you can literally save almost your entire salary if your personal peccadilloes are minimal. I knew guys that decided 4 years was enough and emerged after 4 years with over 50k in savings while paying nothing and they also got the BA/BSc degree on Uncle Sam's dime. They emerged debt free, degreed, and ready to start the next stage of their lives. Doing 8 years gets you a masters all the while doing nothing but work a job with everything paid for. At that rate, you might as well do 20, marry another member and have a steady retirement at 39 or 40 with money enabling you to pursue a job you really love because you can afford to live where you want. Bonus: Tri-Care military medical costs $500 year on retirement. Cannot touch that out here.
You can get much lower debt levels if you don't stay in the expensive dorms (with expensive meal plans) after your freshman year,
As someone who lived off-campus the entire time and regretted it, I do think that spending at least freshman year in dorms is a really good idea to make friends and get to know the school's culture and environment.
if you plan ahead and graduate in 4 years, and if you apply for many local/state scholarships (in my experience the national scholarships are a waste of time).
My advice to my younger self would also be to take more student loans so I wouldn't have to work. I had to work to pay tuition, but working made keeping up with school impossible. Catch 22.
> My advice to my younger self would also be to take more student loans so I wouldn't have to work. I had to work to pay tuition, but working made keeping up with school impossible. Catch 22.
This is counter to my experience. I was able to work part-time jobs just fine, and having that experience made me a much more competitive candidate upon graduation.
Depends on a lot of factors -- morning vs. night chronotype, how close work is to school, how close school and work are to housing, how many hours work demands, whether your landlord is insane and kicks you all out with 3 days notice right before the semester to rent to a family, etc.
I would still have worked most if not all of my summers, but never more than 5 hours a week during the semesters. My job, which I actually really liked, demanded 20, which also required another 6-10 hours commuting on top of 5-8 hours of commuting to school.
I had also worked in tech for a year before starting school, so I was a bit less worried about having experience to list. And in the end it didn't matter because I started a company and ran that for 5 years instead.
At least for me, the key was to keep it capped at 10 hours a week. With more hours than that I would have struggled to balance coursework, social life, work, and sleep.
You definitely can't pay for everything on 10 hours a week, but it at least pays the bar tab...
This is pretty much my own history, too. (I think I took three years to pay them off, too!) And yet, many--I'd say most--people out there don't want to be computer programmers or work in other technical fields. They still need degrees to be employable at all in most fields, and with the state of student debt, it's pretty reckless to just roll out claims like the ones you've made.
"Affordable" is doing a lot of work there, particularly when before you didn't say "affordable" and did say "very respectable".
I went to a "very respectable" public land-grant university in my home state and today that school costs $15K a year outside of room and board ($35K/year for out-of-state), and students should live on-campus at minimum the first year--so let's say, best case, you're looking at $70K for in-state. Plus living expenses, and despite your claims elsewhere in-thread I can personally attest that part-time jobs even ten years ago took a bite out of but did not solve the problem of food, board, etc.--so we're probably talking closer to $100K when all is said and done.
Even if you assume some defraying of costs, a student loan bill of $50K (which was about what I left school with) is staggering for many non-technical folks, coming out of college looking at salaries closer to $40K than $100K when they can find a job at all. Further, the knock-on effects are financially hazardous. If you end up on income-based repayment because, y'know, jobs are hard to find unless you're a computer toucher and even then there probably aren't enough for everybody, you will be paying less-than-interest, and the principal only grows.
Put frankly, I would advise the cultivation of more empathy for those not as economically advantaged as you or me. This stuff is staggeringly, mind-wreckingly expensive for people who aren't in tech, and yet functionally required because of the structures we have allowed to be built.
> This stuff is staggeringly, mind-wreckingly expensive for people who aren't in tech, and yet functionally required because of the structures we have allowed to be built.
Society has always worked this way. Those who have rare skills get paid the most. Supply and demand and what not. Universities are gateways to advanced skills, especially in traditional occupations where equipment is often expensive (medical, chemical, mechanical, etc). The reason you go to a university is so that you can get advanced skills in order to make an advanced salary. It makes no sense to go to a university by default and come out with a degree that doesn't teach you advanced skills that get you a high wage. If the jobs that your degree are going to get you aren't going to pay for what that degree cost you then you made a poor decision by taking on that debt.
This sort of thing is why I believe basic economics should be a hard requirement in high school. You shouldn't be able to get a high school diploma without understanding the mechanisms of debt/leverage. So many people have screwed themselves over because they don't understand that the only reason to ever take on debt is to use it as leverage so that you can earn even more than the debt you took on. Any other reason is foolish.
It's really sad when you think about it, so many people would be way better off if they knew the definition of leverage. Such a simple concept, yet so powerful (it's funny how knowing about leverage gives one so much leverage in life).
> The reason you go to a university is so that you can get advanced skills in order to make an advanced salary.
Most of your post is pretty good, but I laughed aloud at this, tbh. The reason you go to a university is because your resume gets thrown out for almost any desk job--hell, for Starbucks--if you don't have a bachelor's.
It is functionally necessary. These aren't "rare skills". These are employer-mandated minimums, and it leaves people with that inflated student debt, encouraged and pushed upon them by their parents and by the expectations of society, to subsidize those employers' demands.
Man, that's weird. US really is different to our North-European way of life.
We are middle class and have two kids but our kids have close to no hobby expenses. Our son is vehemently anti-hobby and daughters dance and piano lessons are not really that expensive. On the other hand we have no-one close for whom we should "keep up appearances".
Government will pay for the kids degrees. Ditto for healthcare and the dentists for kids are excellent.
I know some kids play hockey or whatever and that can be a bit steep but never have I felt such would be a mandatory hobby. Neither of my kids really showed interest for any team sports and we gladly obliged not to force introduce them.
Sure you need to buy food for 4 persons and wash a bit more laundry, but that's about it when I think of the "overhead" caused by kids. The necessity for an apartment with a few more rooms is probably the biggest financial burden but loans are cheap.
The fact only one of us is capable of working due to health reasons is a much bigger issue financially than having kids.
It’s not the US, it’s a certain income bands in the US. This forum is probably full of many people who earn at least $100k per year, if not much more, and are likely to be partnered up with someone earning the same. Naturally, if you’re hanging out with people that have a lot of disposable income, they’re going to use that to give their kids as much of a leg up as they can to maximize their kids’ chances of moving up to the next step on the ladder.
They're also tend to blow money on things that have no real use whatsoever yet they fervently believe they are absolutely necessary to live a normal life even though 95+% of the planet lives without them.
Some things, but I think it's evident that the neighborhood/friends/schools/network you make are a big factor in one's upward mobility, so parents are willing to part with a lot of money to increase those odds.
But it is optional. There's social pressure for all kinds of things, including getting married and having children.
You have to figure out how to get food & shelter and follow local laws. Everything else is unequivocally optional. I would argue that "not seen as optional" is just a way of saying "I don't own up to my choices."
Agreed with not sending them to college. My wife and I are not paying for college. I have a daughter who is getting close to graduating HS. She has two choices: get a local job and attend the local university or go in the military and have Uncle Sam pay for it. I did the latter many moons ago and I'm glad I did. These days, if you are disciplined, you can go in the Air Force, for example, and get your degree in less than 4 years almost free. If you hate it after four years, you leave debt free, have veteran status and hiring preferences, and you paid nothing for your medical/dental/lodging/food. If you like it, go back in as an officer and still not pay for anything other than a tiny officer housing sum for single officers. If you marry an officer and do 20 years, you can salt away some serious cash and still be young enough at retirememt (39-40 yo) to get a second gig. If the government doesn't ruin Social Security, you'll get that, too. All the while not paying for medical or dental, two things which out in the civilian world are costly. Just my 0.02.
Editing to say that kids are not too expensive if they're healthy. If you have children who have medical conditions, then all bets are off. What really pisses me off is the local school district always begging for money. I pay those thieves almost over $5000 year in property tax, since we live in an area with ridiculous property taxes. Whenever I've visited the school and my children have also seen this, they beg for school supplies, but the closets in all of my kid's classrooms are brimming with supplies. They spend more on sports than they do on education, which really irks me. Sports may be important, but nowhere near as education. 1% of 1% go on to play pro sports, but here they act as if sports are more important. Classes are let out early to watch games, yet the school district where we live is a poor performer academically. My own children are fine, but that's because we watch and are involved.
Colleague I knew in London literally spent more on daycare for his two kids than he did on his mortgage.
The other option is that one parent quits their job and stays home, but that is also a massive (opportunity) cost if you're both educated and have a decent career.
Strictly speaking the problem isn't that the kid is expensive, it is that, per your two options, 1) childcare is expensive, and 2) London / their spending habits are too expensive to support a stay-at-home parent. There are lots of other choices that one can make, although they are problem not the common choices. They might actually be happier with some of the other choices, from stories I hear of people that sat down and thought about other options.
It really has nothing to do with being able to support a stay-at-home parent or not. If you're bringing home 100k a year and quit your job to raise kids then the opportunity cost of having kids is 100k a year. The fact that you can afford to 'lose' that money doesn't change that.
Now you may think it's worth 'paying' 100k a year to gain all the non-monetary benefits of staying at home and raising kids, but that is a separate discussion.
My experience- I had my first kid when I was totally broke. Working multiple minimum wage jobs. Everything was thrift store, hand-me-down, government assistance. Instead of child care, I worked every day and night so our kids could be with their mother.
As I built my career, my lifestyle inflated, and so did the kid’s expenses. We make in 3 days what used to take us a month.
The kids get to share our lifestyle with us. It’s probably different for us because we’ve never been well off + not have kids.
Funny you mention this. I live near Houston, Texas, soon to be, if not already, the 3rd largest city in America. What I'm seeing around me in north Houston burbs is somewhat disturbing, namely two things: 1. An outbreak of RV parks (6 near me in less than two years) 2. An outbreak of tiny home parks (Several in my area). What pains me is driving by the RV parks, where entire families are living in an RV not much larger than my kitchen and I see kids boarding the school bus. Some of you may disagree, but that is no way for a child to grow up. While I don't have anything against this per se, the stigma of that lifestyle can damage children. The rotten-ass kids at school make terrible fun of children who live in trailer parks, RV parks, tiny homes. Of course this is no fault of the children in those conditions, as they have no say in how they live, only in how they perform at school. This area lives and dies by oil and gas jobs. It's likely no accident that in the last couple of years, those jobs have bottomed out and many people have lost their jobs. I don't know if there is a correlation between the job losses (tens of thousands) and the number of cheaper housing accommodations springing up, but it's real and it's somewhat disturbing to see so many people in a down-and-out state.
Editing to say that these are not the $500,000 RVs that retired people holiday in. They are kitchen-sized campers (for lack of a better term) that may be the size of 6-8 cubicles. They need outside water connections which many don't have, and they almost always need propane attachments. Many have composting toilets which the owner needs to clean out, as they cannot connect to the sewer lines.
An acceptable daycare for the "professional, white collar" class is minimum $1,500 per child per month and doctor visits are at least $200 or $250 out of pocket each time for regular viral/bacterial infections.
Kids aren't cheap if you want to keep up with your socioeconomic class. And by far the biggest cost is the extra you pay for a house to be located near other high earners so that the schools your kids go to is filled with kids of other high earners.
I make less money than someone in the US, but daycare for me is 250 euro (it was 500 until 3 years old) and public daycare would be cheaper still. Visiting the doctor for a random virus brought back from school costs exactly 0 (a private visit would be around 100 euros). An orthodontist, if needed, would be the only major expense for a child apart from clothing and food.
University will be about 4000 euros a year at most (and would be cheaper if I earned less).
A large emotional/spiritual investment... And financially as well, especially considering the cost of child care nowadays. Tax breaks help (in US), but not that much.
Sure, you don't have to send them to college, but if you don't help them pay for some sort of education or training after high school, you're doing them a massive disservice if you can afford it at all.
You may say, oh well they can just get loans, true, but you can only get so much in federal loans before you have to get private, non dischargeable loans for ~ 7% interest.
Alternatively, you might say oh, they can just join the military. Only problem is the Air Force and Navy don't want little Johnny and now he's getting blown up doing patrols with the 3rd ID in Iraq (I lost my childhood best friend this way).
TLDR: If you don't want to help your kid pay for college or trade school, just don't have them. No one should have to go deeply in debt or put their lives at risk to earn a decent living.
