Beautiful answer -- why would you just accumulate savings without using them for living an interesting life? It's worth taking risks. I'm considering doing something of the sort, probably much less risky actually.
Having kids. Not that you have to do this with kids, but it is a reason
Other than providing tutors and making sure their children are in the best secondary schools, I don’t understand the American obsession with paying for college.
The best way to prepare your child is to let them experience reality not coddle them.
- A luxury university diploma will not guarantee a good job
- There are other educational opportunities besides an expensive university
- Acquiring internships and work experience is far more valuable to establishing a network and getting your foot in the door
It is unrealistic to expect parents to go into crippling debt to pay for your entire time at a luxury university when a regular school and internships will suffice.
Also, I’m not talking about “expensive” hobbies. Almost all sports need some sort of equipment and time investment from the parents. Summer camps for some parents are a necessity because they need child care during summer months. Vacations for kids are also expensive and people typically save all year long to take them. I could go on.
It all adds up and while you can get clothes at goodwill there are some expenses that are unavoidable and scale linearly with quality.
In my country preschool is free and it’s all around good. I don’t think we ever had to use any summer care either. Kids are now 12 and 15… the only necessary thing that is more expensive is the house since it needs to fit more people but that is just about the size, not location dictated by a good school as such.
For us all expenses related to quality of life just scale linearly with headcount.
I estimate I spend about €1000 more per month for having one baby. It's pretty significant in a country where the average employee earns €2000/month after tax (and a senior engineer is at €3500/month roughly).
My college experience was at a regular school learning and gaining experience through work. No debt, no loans, and state scholarship that paid 100% tuition if I went to a public school in my state. The scholarship required a 3.0 in high school and thereafter. Most of my high school friends who went to college did a similar thing.
Sure some went to Ivy League or other expensive networking type schools but it was the exception.
>- A luxury university diploma will not guarantee a good job
Maybe not guarantee but it can certainly make a difference. All else being equal a job candidate with a degree from University of Florida is going to get passed up for one with a degree from Yale and one with a degree from University of South Florida is going to get passed up for the one from University of Florida.
Childcare at 4,000 is upper quartile of expensive cities. You’ll find many places where it’s half or less of that price. Private schools at $50k a year are either going to be boarding or some of the more expensive country day schools. Even Sidwell, where Obama sent his kids, is cheaper than this.
And finally we get to university education. There are many schools with merit based scholarships. Treating living expenses as unique to college is also wrong.
Nothing is stopping a kid from getting a job in college!
Most of the people on this site aren't farmers living in Rural Iowa so idk how relevant the cost of living in places like that are.
>And finally we get to university education. There are many schools with merit based scholarships. Treating living expenses as unique to college is also wrong.
Not everyone is getting scholarship. Obviously that changes the calculus.
>Nothing is stopping a kid from getting a job in college!
This is pure boomer sentiment. I had a job every summer in college and through grad school, this was only ~10 years ago and it paid for exactly 0% of my tuition. It was enough to survive the summers and pay my rent during grad school that was it.
It also digs into time that you could be socializing, or as professionals call it "networking". Having a job during school also is downward pressure on your grades, it makes it very hard to have top performance in your classes. Which excludes you from most scholarships.
Anecdotally I had two jobs most of my time during university, one on weekends one on evenings.
I wound up with less debt (note, not NO debt, just less) than most of my classmates but the tradeoff was that I basically entered the workforce basically already burned out and that was a seriously negative impact on my early career.
> Childcare at 4,000 is upper quartile of expensive cities. You’ll find many places where it’s half or less of that price. Private schools at $50k a year are either going to be boarding or some of the more expensive country day schools.
You either have not lived in expensive cities in the US or at least didn't have kids while there!
For example in this list nearly all schools are over 50K:
https://www.niche.com/k12/search/best-private-high-schools/m...
Kids aren't the huge bill that people seem to think they are unless the parents have a spending problem or don't really want to raise the kids and lease out the education, child care, and transportation duties to other people/organizations. Then it can be really expensive to pay someone else to raise your child.
The average amount spent on a child per year is 17k [1]. It may not be that much if you're making $200k+/yr, but on the median household income of $71k/yr [2], it's a pretty significant chunk — about ~24% of your income for just one child.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2022/cos...
[2] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2022/demo/p60-27...
I do think that families that figure out how to at least have one parent home for the kids seem to have better relationships with them. I like the idea of families that can swap each parent having a year or something with the kids, the issue is that most careers don't support that model. You can't have multiple year gaps in your resume nor do both spouses often make the same income.
A local 4 year degree at my city's state run university is around 18,000 to 22,000 per year for tuition. And that's without room and board.
In comparison a private liberal arts school near me is $65,652 per year for tuition alone.
To me the state option is still pretty darn expensive especially if you are also paying for the kids room and board.
You say this like this is normal advice.
People make all sorts of wild recommendations during a bull market, it wasn't that long ago that people were trading stories of buying Bitcoin with the money their grandparents gave thrm for college.
Long-term, the American style meritocratic striving is probably unsustainable and harmful in innumerable ways. But it is _rational_ at least in terms of the choices parents make. Numerous metrics point to increasing economic disparities; the rungs on the ladder keep getting farther and farther apart. How can I as a parent best position my child to negotiate that climb? Parents, who as a rule worry about such things on behalf of their children respond by taking various interventions on behalf of their kids. One is spending money to buy merit, however distorted the concept is in the U.S.
An expensive education doesn’t guarantee a good job? True. But if they have the means, it’s reasonable to anticipate that parents are going to play the probabilities. The problems that arise for parents, their driven kids and the broader society are significant; and I would prefer the circumstances to be otherwise; but that’s going to take an enormous cultural change in the U.S. One that’s more systemic than that of parents choosing to send their kids to less costly universities.
Exactly right. The OP set up a ridiculous straw man. Avoiding smoking doesn't guarantee you won't get lung cancer.
The returns to education are well documented and large.
https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2021/data-on-display/educa...