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Comment by alsoicode | Hacker News Reader

It's not easy, and there are trade offs, but we did. We have two kids out of the house. One on their own, the other will be a senior in college next year. We have a younger child in 5th grade that we home school.

We felt it was better for the kids to have one parent at home versus sending them to day care and spending a ton of money on that. It just wasn't worth what the take-home was after paying for that.

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What would you say the lifetime cost of raising your two children conception -> college is roughly?

https://business.time.com/2009/09/18/1-1-million-cost-to-rai...

Article from 2009 says $1.1m

> When you add it all up, it’s not uncommon for a single child to cost a normal, middle-class family something like $1.1 million, from birth through the undergrad years.

Brookings says it’s about $310k per child for a family with 2 children, without including daycare or higher ed costs [1]. US median lifetime income is roughly $1.65 million [2]. Daycare averages somewhere between $10k-$15k/year per child [3]. In state public school tuition is ~$100k for 4 years [4]. Median sales price of a house is ~$425k [5]. Total cost of that house with mortgage interest and taxes over 30 years is roughly double that.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33879844 (courtesy u/lotsofpulp)

[2] https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/bitstream/handle/1...

[3] https://www.americanprogress.org/article/understanding-true-...

[4] https://educationdata.org/average-in-state-vs-out-of-state-t...

[5] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS

That’s 50k a year from birth to 22, I don’t need to explain how this doesn’t make sense

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