Middle class Americans can absolutely afford to have kids. People in certain metros maybe can't afford it, but living there is often a choice they explicitly make, or at the very least talk themselves into. Sure you make half as much working somewhere else, but the cost of living is also a quarter as much.
Every time I read something about the cost of having kids I'm looking for some idea of where these people live.
The single largest expense for kids is day care and that's only necessary if you have 2 working parents...and if one of those parents income doesn't more than justify the cost of daycare it's usually a better idea to have a stay at home.
People seriously take for granted the financial value that a stay at home parent brings to a home in overall cost savings. Expenses go up based on lack of time, more so than anything else. It affects your shopping, cooking, home maintenance, yard maintenance, eating out, fuel costs and long term child care costs (after school activities, day care, summer day camps, etc) that you have to worry about when you keep needing to free up time so that you can get to work.
And all of those expenses are higher in densely populate areas where there's more demand for all of the "good" activities.
But it often comes down to a matter of pride to have a stay at home parent.
Current income justifying day care is a short term and fallacious comparison. You need to look at long term potential. Leaving the labor force does more than just set you back the years you were gone.
You do of course...but you also have to determine long term cost potential of all of the other expenses and savings besides day care.
It compounds in both directions and gets amplified by the continued lack of time due to balancing home and work commitments. Usually it takes a couple of years of exhaustion before people come face to face with the realization that things would be much easier of one person was a stay at home.
The formula is trickiest in the middle. At the higher end, a lot of couples will hire a nanny that can provide many of the same benefits as a stay at home. At the lower end, the decision is fairly easy.
It's in the middle where it's toughest to come to grips with it.
Also really depends what you are chasing, both as an individual and a family unit. It's an optimization problem where there are more variables than income.
Edit:
Personally, I think the whole financial independence movement is pretty interesting, and sometimes I get myself through the day by viewing it as my wife being financially independent. Which is halfway there as far as things go.
I should have clarified. Middle class Americans cannot afford to have kids if they want the type of lifestyle they grew up with. Someone who grew up in Boston will need to move further out; someone who grew up with a single mom in Austin can no longer afford to raise a kid there without a spouse.
A lot of American's grew up middle class but aren't anymore, they still think of themselves as such but truly aren't. This is how most Millenials live, they are too broke to have kids, think of themselves as middle class because they grew up that way, even if in reality they aren't.
Being able to support yourself and a family with a (single) full time job. That includes owning a home, a car, being able to afford to see a doctor when you have to, going to the occasional movie and taking a vacation once in a while. It includes being able to do all these things without being one illness or one unexpected expense away from being homeless or destitute. It includes the prospect of being able to be able to retire no later than your mid 60s with enough money to maintain a similar (if not the same) standard of living.
~40 years ago this "middle class" standard of living was readily attainable for anyone who diligent, reasonable intelligent, and willing to work hard. Not only that, it was standard for such a lifestyle to be achievable with only one household member working. Now the much more common circumstance is that both adults work, many of the above living conditions are barely achievable, if at all, and many families are one financial hiccup away from disaster.
We can debate over the various reasons for this change in the economic landscape for working people, but there is no debate to be had over the reality of it. The change has been substantive. Its much, much harder for the average working person today to live comfortably and raise a family than it was just a few decades ago.
That all seems pretty true. People have spent that past decade telling me that I'm going to be less well off than my parents, though. So I guess my opinion is that it's best to just accept it and adjust your lifestyle accordingly. We still live like kings compared to most of human history.
Also, the social safety net in the US isn't great, but it definitely exists. You can be a pretty big screw up and still have a roof over your head. You just won't have much else.
>People have spent that past decade telling me that I'm going to be less well off than my parents, though. So I guess my opinion is that it's best to just accept it and adjust your lifestyle accordingly.
If I told you I was going to beat you up and steal your money every night, it doesn't mean you should just smile and accept it as inevitable, even if that's really my plan.
>We still live like kings compared to most of human history.
We have more collective wealth than any time in human history, and more collective wealth than we did ~40 years ago when working people had the living conditions I described above. As far as I'm concerned, there's no "good" or "acceptable" reason that the artificial system ("the economy") that we designed and continue to maintain, that has resulted in far worse living conditions for the average American, should not be changed so that our collective wealth is more evenly distributed among those who participate in our system. Especially dishonest and (more frequently) ignorant people will blame the, "free market" for the massive (and growing) disparity in wealth, but there is nothing about our economic system that is "free". From our central bank to our byzantine "regulatory" structure to our legal system to our tax code to currency control and beyond, we have a financial system that is tightly controlled, regulated, and guided by powerful, entrenched interests at the upper echelon of the financial world. It isn't even useful to draw a distinction between governmental and non-governmental entities at this level, because they are the same. Our economy has been guided and controlled by a rotating door of corporatists (or whatever other adjective you choose to describe our economic oligarchs) to ensure wealth consolidation.
We can either recognize the problem - that our whole system has been off the rails for some time and is horribly broken - or we can continue down the same path of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer until we reach a breaking point. Hopefully we choose the former path but unfortunately the latter seems more likely.
> If I told you I was going to beat you up and steal your money every night, it doesn't mean you should just smile and accept it as inevitable, even if that's really my plan
I didn't say smile and accept it. I said "adjust your lifestyle". The rules changed, so how you play needs to change with it.
If you tell me you're going to beat me up and take my money every time you see me, I'm going to make sure we don't cross paths.
My point is that there is no reason to be surprised at what is happening because people have been telling us that is what will happen.
The fact is, there are a bunch of people who are in effect living a life of "He told me he'd beat me up and take my money every day, and sure enough every time I see him, he beats me up and takes my money, but maybe tomorrow he won't!"
When someone shows you their cards, take advantage of it, is all I'm saying.
Living in the Midwest on a Midwest salary ($85k/yr), currently 30 years old, have 3 kids, a stay at home wife, and a net worth that just peeked over $250k.
Also, our work health insurance is shit, so $200 gets taken out of my paycheck each week for that, which puts it right around the $12k you mentioned.
Daycare is stupid expensive. Healthcare is stupid expensive. We handle the former by having my wife stay home. The latter is just an unfortunate fact of life.
I really don't know how much it costs to live on the coasts, but on a developer salary you can live very comfortably in the Midwest (Ames, Iowa here).
A single-income family with children and a stay-at-home parent isn't an unfortunate fact of life, it's a stable economic and social arrangement that promotes health and welfare of children, giving them a strong prospect for future success.
So you are saying if you have a non-fatal health incident then you are in serious financial trouble?
My wife and I are in the same position. We pay $209 a month for “healthcare” coverage that has a $700 yearly deductible. If either of us got sick or injuries we would be totally screwed. The US system is broken. We have massive wealth inequality, an educational system in crisis, and a toxic political system.
I assume by $700 you mean $7000? Also wondering if your $209 / month figure was accurate. What your comment currently describes is 1/4 the premium and 1/10th the deductible that my family has.
I agree that healthcare in the US is completely broken. It is in fact one of my favorite things to gripe about to anyone who will listen or who happens to be in my vicinity at the wrong moment.
I think our current "out of pocket max" is somewhere around $6k/year. The bill for having twins blew through that pretty well. When we had our first child, our deductible was roughly twice as much and I think we maybe just scratched the out of pocket max. Those insurance premiums were only a third of what we pay now though, which was a better trade off in my opinion.
Would we be financially ruined by running into something like that again? No. Would we be majorly inconvenienced? Yes.
