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Comment by silverquiet | Hacker News Reader

A luxury lifestyle is cheaper than a child. The last estimates I’ve seen are around $300K (and that was before the recent bouts of inflation) to raise a kid and that didn’t include college. So that’s like a Lamborghini, right? Or a lot of fancy vacations. And that’s just one kid; you might get some economies of scale with more, but the marginal costs are there too.

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Yeah this wildly off.

4 kids, typical tech salary ladder career / upper middle class lifestyle, my marginal costs are maaaaybe another $40k year in total ... and I get about a $25k tax break for having them.

In other words, you're spending more than half the median US household income on raising children. I think this is more a statement about your wealth than the affordability of children.

If this was actually true I'd be bankrupt many times over.

I'm sure it depends on how you do things. I think the housing square footage and vehicle requirements a lot of people say they require seem way too high to me. But I suppose there are some regulatory requirements that must be met these days - I was looking at an old station wagon with some buddies and noted that it had what I called the "unrestrained child tub" in the back. I bet you could fit six kids in there easy since there were no seat belts at all. Obviously that wouldn't fly today. Nowadays, it's "I need an SUV with a 3rd row for the kids".

And houses today are also probably a lot bigger than they need to be; often justified as a requirement for families. I don't think it's really necessary, but I seem to be an outlier with my 950 square foot house.

I imagine you've made more pragmatic choices, but I think there is also an element of luck; a lot of people get bankrupted by medical needs, and each kid is a reverse lottery ticket there. Speaking as someone who was once a kid with a lot of medical needs that didn't always get addressed, I can tell you that that does happen sometimes. And I needed to go to school; with my medical issues, the trades or military or whatever was never an option, so someone had to pay for that.

I guess all I can say is "shit's tough"; sometimes you get lucky, but I never seem to.

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