Reply to Am I crazy to worry? Is my hope that expenses drop when the kids hit school a pipedream?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]To go back to your question, this is what I found.  Baby care was $250 per week.  By age four it dropped to $220 per week.  For school aged kids, we needed before and aftercare, which ran $120 per week.  (This is all per kid and we have three).  A lot of the  savings, however, got burned up with the cost of summer camp.  That runs from $235 per week per kid to $500 per week per kid depending on the choices we make, and it goes for ten weeks.

Here's what happened otherwise.  One of our kids needed private tutoring.  For the year that it was needed, that ran $15,000.  Another needed some speech therapy.  Not expensive because it was only co pays, but we either had to pay someone to take him or burn all of our leave.  If I'm remembering correctly, that was about $100 per week, but also short lived, maybe a year and fortunately not the same year as tutoring.  For the third, we did some private schooling instead of public, which ran about $12,000 for a year, including before and aftercare.

As they get older, the cost of feeding them increases exponentially.  Over the past few years, my grocery bill has close to tripled (teenage boys).  And eating out has close to tripled as well.  Even if its just pizza, one used to work, but now it's a minimum of two, sometimes additional food.  And, they eat off the adult menus, wanting things like salmon.

Cost of activities also increases.  Many can be done cheaply through school, where your primary cost is the tennis shoes.  But, if your child likes dance, gymnastics or travel team sports, your costs can go through the roof.  I have one kid in competitive sports and my annual cost is $9,000 plus some donations to the scholarship fund for kids who are struggling to pay.  Even dance for my casually interested kid is $100 a month.  Tennis lessons run me $200 or so a month.  Chess club, which is offered at school but not free, is about $500 a year a kid.

One last thing.  Clothes and "toys" get really expensive.  I didn't actually buy my kids much when they were little.  I did lots of clothes and toy swaps instead.  But now that they're older, Christmas is filled with electronics and princess castles which are, well, just expensive.

As a PP pointed out, so much of this is optional.  You don't have to give your child everything that's out there.  You can choose the cheap camps and decide to forego meals out and Competitive sports.  We choose otherwise, and as a result, I don't see the savings from daycare days.  However, your Childcare is super expensive compared to mine, so you are likely to see your costs decrease.

[/quote]

This is exactly right.[/quote]

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