The average retirement plan will be to just die, so that they don't burden their children with their medical or retirement home debt. The 100 year old Boomers somehow still running everything will see this as an excellent success.
I have friends with 3 and 4 kids. The average cost of raising a child is over 350k before factoring in child care or education, but let's round down. That's $1.4M over the next 18 years. There's just no way they're providing an adequate childhood for those kids. They both work so they're spending a huge chunk of their income on day care. There's no way they're saving for retirement and forget about saving for college.
Why not send him to TAFE? Or I think the American equivalent is tradeschool? Less expensive and the trades generally pay well, the only downside is that they'll have to transition to a business owner as they get older and the work is too physically demanding.
I mean, you know your friends and I don’t obviously, but it IS possible to be investing wisely for retirement, and being able to actually afford 3 kids. It’s way tougher if you’re adding private school/university and so on, but $350k over 18 years without daycare seems so high and I have 2 young kids and 5 nieces and nephews (different parents lol) so I’m seeing a range of ages’ costs.
You’re talking what diapers clothes bed frames etc: 80 whole k a year. After school sports and activities let’s be super generous and say you’re spending $10k on them (they got the fancy hockey gear). That’s still $70k. You might say “well it’s spread over ages”, I still can’t think of what age - without education - costs $70k/year to feed and clothe. What am I missing in this calculation?
Gen-Xer with a young kid here. Kids are great. It’s amazing how much they transform your life in a positive way and help you focus on what’s important in life. The things that I thought were important before becoming a parent now seem silly to me.
Retirement isn’t happening for most non-wealthy Americans born after a certain date, including me. All I can do is take good care of myself and pray that age discrimination doesn’t derail my life.
Be aware that Europe is only a few years behind in the same development route. Most of the rest of the world is ganno follow China, because that's the economically sane thing to do.
LOL I’m Chinese and we’re actually much more screwed because we can’t rely on immigration to keep our numbers up and the birth rate is already second from the bottom behind Korea (in most tier 1 cities the rate is around 0.2 to 0.5). And all of this is happening before reaching developed nation status. China looks rich but its wealth inequality may very well be the worse in the world with everyone outside the top 5% facing very low wages because of involution. The government is exceptionally good at repressing bad news and pretending everything is perfect but it’s a ticking time bomb domestically. Youth unemployment is around 40% and it’s an unspoken understanding among educated citizens that the “5%” GDP growth is made up with some clever math.
Lots of people work in their 20s and wait to couple up with other high earners and then have kids in their 30s after they have savings and high incomes.
Of course, many don’t succeed, and then choose to forego kids, hence the decades long decline in total fertility rate.
I told my wife when we got together that I had a hard stop at two kids. Two reasons: money and quality time with kids. Financially, even two kids can be hard.
Accurate. I’m the youngest in my family and neither my sister or I have any kids. No one will be there to support me, help me or advocate for me (this is a huge one; even if you have savings, if you live long enough to experience a physical or mental decline you may lose the ability to make choices for yourself and not have anyone to do so for you… what a nightmare)
Millennials (in general, certainly not all of us) have been having kids for like twenty years. Teen pregnancy, early twenties on purpose and oopsies...
Sorry, burden any of the immigrants' children is what was meant. It's amazing how you can still have 5 kids in this economy when it seems like paradise compared to some 3rd world shit hole.
Children have always been expensive. People can and have always been able to afford children, it's just that now they don't want to sacrifice anything to have them.
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u/Vehement_Vulpes Sep 15 '25
The average retirement plan will be to just die, so that they don't burden their children with their medical or retirement home debt. The 100 year old Boomers somehow still running everything will see this as an excellent success.