The cost of children
Having a child is expensive. Having seven is an investment! I looked up the actual calculated cost of having a child and it was around $325,000 from birth to age 21! We have a $2.2 million investment going on here!! WOW! This calculation was broken down to include housing, food, transportation, clothing, health care, education, miscellaneous and college. The miscellanous was under $2000. I beg to differ there!! I think that is per year, not per 21 years!
There must be another category for the bottles of shampoo that get dumped down the drain, the food that gets wasted, the carpet that gets destroyed because of nail polish, the gallons of paint and dry wall patch stuff to refresh the walls, the dead plants, the boxes of bandages used as stickers, the rolls of stamps also used as stickers, the electricity used to heat the outside on winter days and cool it in the summer, not to mention lighting the room for no one. And the packages of gum that are snuck and consumed, as well as popscicles, chocolate chips and marshmallows from the pantry. What about all the broken stuff...any of it! Is that under miscellaneous? And you know, they didn't take into consideration the sex of the child. We consumed 3/4 of a cow in nine months, and I think we exceeded the health care allowance with the ambulance ride and the stitches in the emergency room x 2 this spring. I can't imagine that we'll have as many ER visits with the two girls, but I won't hold my breath either on that one.
Now, we've definitely modified our budget, and we really don't care when people say, "Do you know how much it's going to cost to have that many kids?" I guess that question is right up there with "Don't you know what causes that??" DUH!! So our kids will be driving '65 pintos instead of '65 Mustangs...and the pinto will be a horse, not a car!
It would be fun to know just how accurate this is, but we haven't tracked things well enough to effectively determine that, and I doubt that we'll start anytime soon. It doesn't matter anyway, there's really not anything better that I can think of to spend our money on. They may not inherit a single penny when we die, but there is no price tag on love.
There must be another category for the bottles of shampoo that get dumped down the drain, the food that gets wasted, the carpet that gets destroyed because of nail polish, the gallons of paint and dry wall patch stuff to refresh the walls, the dead plants, the boxes of bandages used as stickers, the rolls of stamps also used as stickers, the electricity used to heat the outside on winter days and cool it in the summer, not to mention lighting the room for no one. And the packages of gum that are snuck and consumed, as well as popscicles, chocolate chips and marshmallows from the pantry. What about all the broken stuff...any of it! Is that under miscellaneous? And you know, they didn't take into consideration the sex of the child. We consumed 3/4 of a cow in nine months, and I think we exceeded the health care allowance with the ambulance ride and the stitches in the emergency room x 2 this spring. I can't imagine that we'll have as many ER visits with the two girls, but I won't hold my breath either on that one.
Now, we've definitely modified our budget, and we really don't care when people say, "Do you know how much it's going to cost to have that many kids?" I guess that question is right up there with "Don't you know what causes that??" DUH!! So our kids will be driving '65 pintos instead of '65 Mustangs...and the pinto will be a horse, not a car!
It would be fun to know just how accurate this is, but we haven't tracked things well enough to effectively determine that, and I doubt that we'll start anytime soon. It doesn't matter anyway, there's really not anything better that I can think of to spend our money on. They may not inherit a single penny when we die, but there is no price tag on love.
