Biggest Cost of Raising A Child

We are 2.5 years into raising our first child. Life has slowly gotten a bit easier as our daughter is now able to do some very basic tasks herself. At first I tried to keep careful watch over our expenses associated with raising a child, but that idea quickly ran out of steam.

A reader recently asked what our biggest expense was related to having children. At this point its very simple; our biggest expense is time. We thought we were busy before kids, but are now at a whole new level now that we have someone that is dependent on us 24 hours a day in addition to all the existing responsibilities we had before.

All other expenses related to raising children are quite small compared to the amount if time it takes to raise and care for a child. Time = money and I now regularly trade additional money for time compared to before children and struggle to spend as much time as I can with our daughter.

I feel very fortunate to be in a position where we aren't financially stressed to be in a position to buy some additional time (via outsourcing) to have more precious time to spend with our daughter. For families that are struggling financially and are also time poor, I don't know how they do it.

All that said, I also feel blessed to have a wonderful daughter and wouldn't trade the experience for the world :-).

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Comments (1)

Dead on. I remember your blog pre-kid. I remember thinking "just wait." Now you get it. My hat is off to you for not closing up shop completely. There is no way for someone to understand the impact of a kid (or more) unless they have one kid (or more). Peace.

Posted by matt | December 16, 2011 5:13 PM