Periodically people talk about the pros and cons of different lifestyles for EA types, including whether to have children. I wrote up a post, originally here, on what it has cost my family this year. I also wrote up a post on other aspects of our experience this year. hope this may be useful to people deciding whether or when to have children.
Short answer: about $20,000 for the first year.
I just did the math on how much greater our expenses were in 2014 than we would have expected if we had not had a baby in March. I did it based on the calendar year because many of the expenses (medical visits, pre-birth purchases) started before the birth. This is all based on living in Boston, Massachusetts and trying to be fairly frugal but not painfully so.
Childcare: We only used a couple of weeks of daycare at $350/week. We’ve since switched to a system in which Jeff works full time and I work part time, and Lily is never in daycare. Our social life consists mostly of things we can bring her to, so we haven’t really needed babysitters at night.
Clothes: we get most clothes from thrift stores or the local children’s resale shop, where they cost about $4/item. We did get hand-me-downs as well, so it would have been more without those.
Gear: includes bottlefeeding stuff, cloth diapers, toys, a crib, a rug, and a series of glider chairs. In our area, it's easy to find many of these things used on Craigslist. Includes $100 for extra loads of laundry done. We got a carseat as a hand-me-down, but I added $100 to the tally in case you needed to get one. We spent $200 in airline fees to take Lily with us on vacation. Breast pumps are now covered by insurance in the US, but bottles and other parts are not.
Medical/hygiene: copays and miscellaneous purchases at the drug store. We paid more for better medical insurance this year, plus more copays for more medical visits. Most of our insurance premiums are covered by Jeff’s work, so if he worked for a less generous company we would have paid more.
Lost wages: I got no paid maternity leave from my job, though I did save up about two weeks of vacation days. I quit my job for five months, then went back part-time. Jeff used 8 weeks of paid parental leave to care for Lily while I was working. My schedule currently dovetails with Jeff’s: he works full-time starting at around 7 am, and I work evenings and Saturday mornings. If we had less flexible work schedules, or if he had not gotten the two months of paid leave, our costs would be higher.
Housing is conspicuously absent on this chart. We did not change our housing this year, though we did start the process of buying a house. Lily slept in our bedroom. This got hairy at times, and we’re looking forward to having a separate room for her. The delay in moving was more about looking for the right house than about trying to save money.
Food: I ate an extra 500 calories daily while pregnant or breastfeeding. This cost about $500 extra in groceries. Lily’s also eating some solids now, but she mostly eats yogurt and bits of what we’re eating.
We did not pay more for transportation because we did not buy a car. Living with family and being able to use their car sometimes was helpful.
Not included: tax breaks. We expect around $350 in the child tax credit (maximum is $1000 if you earn less than we do). We also expect lower taxes in general because of having a dependent. We don’t know how much this will end up saving us; I’ll update after we do our taxes.
Also not included: costs to our careers. Jeff taking the full paternity leave provided by his work probably hurt his job slightly, though not like it would in a more cut-throat business. Taking time off delayed me getting the hours of supervised work I need for the final step of social work licensure, which is essentially a ticket to better jobs.
The federal government’s “cost to raise a child” calculator thinks we (as a two-parent high-income family in the Northeast) would spend about $30,000 during our child’s first year, not including lost income, which I count as an expense. If we had been scrimping, we could have spent less, especially by using paid childcare for more of the time.
Things that could make it more expensive for other families: moving to larger housing; buying a car or better car; formula-feeding (would cost around $1200/year); less flexible work schedules that would necessitate more child care from other people; less of health insurance covered by work; no paid paternity leave; higher initial earnings resulting in more earnings lost from unpaid leave; living in a more expensive area; using disposable diapers.
Things that could make it less expensive for other families: more free care from relatives; receiving food assistance, daycare vouchers, or other benefits; lower income and thus more child tax credit; living in a cheaper area; using daycare more, allowing both parents to work full time; living in any of the 163 countries that provide paid maternity leave.
Very interesting, thanks for sharing. At exactly the halfway point tomorrow, our first year experience is similar: our housing and furnishing costs have been low, feeding her has been nominally free so far (though you are right there is an increased grocery bill for the nursing mother!), and between hand me downs and gifts, we have only bought about 4 items of clothing! Travelling costs have been low - £90 for an ergobaby carrier was well spent as we haven't needed a pram. We were handed down a car seat but got rid of our car as it wasn't needed.
I'm not sure disposable nappies have been very costly: we spend about £15 a month by only buying when they are on special (which is about a third of the time). The laundry costs and initial outlay would have to be quite low to better this.
A few country specific differences arise for us. There are no insurance premiums or costs associated with her birth. I get free prescriptions and dental care during pregnancy and the first year of her life. In the UK we get £80 pcm in child benefit (this disappears if one of us earns over £50k). My paid maternity leave means the lost wages so far total £2400 post tax, this will increase to roughly £9k for the next six months. (Paid childcare would be cheaper if I returned to work now, but I've decided that since my return to work will be full time, it's better to have another 6 months at home. ). This is a combination of employer maternity pay and a universal (statutory) one.
An aside: while those lost wages are in one sense a baby cost, I'm reluctant to tally them up that way mentally. Staying home with her has often been a joy for me, and has mentally rebooted me in unexpected ways. It's kind of analogous to taking a sabbatical to mentally recuperate. I suspect this is the sort of thing that varies with the parent and also how easy going the child is, but it hadn't struck me that way beforehand.