Reply to How Do We Know if We Can Afford a Kid in the DMV?

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[quote=Anonymous]So, my spouse and I are spending some of our pandemic quality time together doing some planning. We’ve set a tentative TTC date for May 2022. We think we should be in a good place in our lives by then... but how do we KNOW?

I realize a lot of the confusion/anxiety I have on this topic comes from my experience growing up with my LMC family, who were terrible at financial planning. Like, we were never in danger of being out in the streets, but I know my parents’ retirement plans are “win the lottery” (and they’re recently divorced, so that’s two lotteries). They basically never had more than a few thousand saved before some new emergency wiped everything out again. And that was living in a relatively LCOL area, with a surprisingly good public school system. But I feel like I have no standard for what fiscally responsible parenthood looks like.

We bring home about $6500 a month after taxes / health care / retirement stuff + usually another $10-$15k in EOY bonuses at Christmas (although maybe not this year! Thanks COVID). Bonuses aside, our jobs are pretty stable. We have excellent health insurance. Our work places have decent parental leave. Our only debt rn is about $450 a month in student loans (which I will be paying off for a while yet) plus $200 a month on a consolidation loan for some credit card debt my husband racked up when he was first out of college (nearly paid off!). We pay $2k a month for rent in DT SS, but we’re planning on buying a 2-3 bedroom further out next spring and hoping to get that down to closer to $1500 (which will then necessitate a car but I digress). We save about $800 a month, plus a little more when we can. On paper, it feels like it should work - I am 100% positive that there are people raising kids that are in the same boat or worse, and presumably their children are not starving or illiterate or destined for a life of crime!

And yet every time I read an article on how you should be budgeting $600 a month for diapers, I cuss myself out for shackling myself to DC instead of getting a degree in something sensible like IT and moving to Boise. I obsess over greatschools.org and wonder if I will royally screw up my child by buying someplace where they have to go to a 4/10 elementary school. And it doesn’t help that daycares do not actually give you their prices so I can’t fully satisfy my need to create obsessive budget spreadsheets. Then you add in the fact that all of the people I personally know with kids in the DC area are in a whole other tax bracket (my boss’s dad was apparently once nearly the VP of Indonesia despite being a white American???), and I start to think I’m kidding myself for thinking that we could possibly try this in 2022. Or ever.

Any tips for someone who is anxious and feeling uninformed? DC budget breakdowns for MC parents? Advice on public schools? What is it like living in Odenton/Gaithersburg/etc and commuting to DC? Do you actually pay $600 a month for diapers? Is the waiting list for the House of Reps Daycare Center still 3 years long? An aspiring mom wants to know.[/quote]

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