Reply to Other costs of having an AP (car etc)

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[quote=Anonymous]Until a recent move, we were about the same distance as you from metro and ride-on bus.  While it's true that your AP could take these to another major point such as downtown, the issue is that many of her friends won't live in metro-accessible locations.  So it will be hard  for her to have a social life without a car shared at least some of the time.

When we lived in the similar location as you, we shared two cars between DH, AP, and me.  DH rode his bike to work, so AP and I each had a car during weekdays.  On weekends, we needed both cars for the children on Sat mornings, but AP was usually sleeping then anyway.  On Sat afternoons, nights, and Sundays, we worked it out so that AP had a car at least much if not most of the time.

Car insurance varies widely.  We have a German AP who is 19, and the cost of adding her to the policy for one car was $2800.  We are not in MD anymore, so it's possible it might be less if we were, but this is a significant cost to take into account.

For food, our current AP is not a big eater and costs maybe $25 additional per week, mainly in extra milk, fruit, cereal, and juice.  Last year's AP was an enormous eater (skinny as a rail, very athletic), and she ate a small fortune weekly.  Her grocery bill - all for healthy foods, nothing processed and few snacks - was closer to $75 on top of our weekly bill.  That said, we ADORED her (as we do the current AP) so although we joked with her about her appetite, and DH and I would sometimes roll our eyes at the size of her sandwiches and the ingredients in her smoothies, drunk to wash down her enormous sandwiches, we never begrudged her anything and considered it part and parcel of the cost of hosting an AP.

We have a basic cellphone that is connected to our plan, for which we pay 1500 free minutes and unlimited texting for the AP.  No smart phone and no data plan.  Additional expenses are cost of having a third adult on vacations and going out to dinner, cost of having your electricity running all day long while AP is home (we were surprised how much this added), cost of incidentals.  Benefits for us way outweigh the costs, especially for the flexibility/split schedule possibilities and the sheer joy of having a great AP be part of our family.[/quote]

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