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Comment by hdjjhhvvhga | Hacker News Reader

Probably someone already told you this could be a trap. You might never arrive to the point when you feel everything is really perfect to have kids. In my case, I expressed is as the amount of cash I need to have in order to feel secure enough - a concrete amount is much more reachable as an aim.

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I model our cash flow for the rest of our lives to determine when and if we have enough for our goals, and if we need to modify goals. I would say the house/mortgage payment is the big one, and then the roughly $15k to $20k per year per kid for daycare, and then a few thousand per year for doctors. And then a few years of expenses saved up in case we lost our incomes. I think it was in the $200k range (excluding house) or so.

Both my wife and I grew up children of poor immigrants. Neither of us had our own home, much less a room, and we moved around quite a bit, and we did not see a dentist until we both had gotten jobs in our 20s that afforded us dental benefits. I had been in 8 different schools in 7 states by the time I was in 9th grade, and I think we both agreed that financial insecurity was our biggest problem growing up. If we did not have that for our kids, then we were simply happy to go without kids.

So in essence the way you were raised convinced you you'd rather someone not exist rather than have that childhood?

Is that because of what it did to you and your life or because of the stress on your parents?

Yes, I would not want another person to have the childhood I did (although I understand that many, many people around the world have much worse childhoods, including my parents). It did put stress on my parents, of course, but my main motivation is in the interests of the child(ren). Which I guess is also to not have stressed out parents.

I also think I was lucky to have had the life trajectory I did, partly due to just being good at school. My parents never taught me English (and we still do not speak English to each other), but I somehow never had a problem being successful in US schools. I doubt that is the case for many other kids in similar positions.

I was also lucky that I had access to online forums and educated adults to advise me on what choices to make, since my parents were not able to help me. I do not think I would have had a fraction of the success were it not for the internet giving me the ability to communicate with educated people familiar with how things work in the US.

> So in essence the way you were raised convinced you you'd rather someone not exist rather than have that childhood?

Well, that is really a metaphysical question. If there was a way of knowing whether consciousness exists before conception and if so, what is its "quality of life", it would shed a new light on our perspective of not just when, but also whether to have kids and how many.

This is absolutely the best way. My partner and I set our goal at X% of our total annual expenses in savings exclusively, before we started trying for children

A nebulous 'when we're comfortable' will never be comfortable. Whereas a set, concrete goal based on income and expenses is measurable and provides a clear path to an outcome.

What's X, approximately? As a frame, I think 25 times annual expenses is a retirement goal.

Not X times, but X% of. For us, that was 90-100% of annual expenses. We wanted a one year cushion in case something went wrong.

And to be clear - that's cash money, not investments. That is simply a crash easy to access liquid asset in case of emergency. If we couldn't say, this cash is exclusively for this goal, we didn't count it.

It took 6 years to put together, with both of us working in education.

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