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Comment by pitaj | Hacker News Reader

The typical expenses seem pretty high. Why do transportation and housing increase so much with kids?

>The FMR estimates include utility costs and vary depending on the number of bedrooms in each unit, from zero to four bedrooms. We assumed that a one adult family would rent a single occupancy unit(zero bedrooms) for an individual adult household, that a two adult family would rent a one bedroom apartment, and that two adult and one or two child families would rent a two bedroom apartment. We further assumed that families with three children would rent a three bedroom apartment (the adults are allocated one bedroom and the children two bedrooms).

So they covered their assumptions in their technical documentation that is linked at the top of the page. The increase in housing costs seems reasonable to me personally but as with all assumptions not everyone will agree.

Don't all 16 year olds get a car for their birthday or is that just in movies?

Best regards,

Europe

Yes, of course, and a gun.

We usually wait until Christmas so we can put a giant novelty bow around it in the driveway.

Poor Santa must have a serious back pain the 25th... :D

I know youre being sarcastic, but actually in a lot of places yes this is the norm. Or a the very least someone in your friend group will get one so the whole crew is mobile.

While this certainly isn't uncommon, I'm not sure a 16th birthday car gift should be (or is) included in a "living wage".

To answer your facetious question directly, a lot of my friends got cars at 16.

I got one but had to buy it myself using a summer/weekend job. I paid all gas, maintenance, though my parents put it on their insurance.

An automobile is basically a requirement to not starve anywhere outside the core of maybe 5 American cities with acceptable public transit. It's the same as having a pair of shoes.

As kids we biked everywhere living in a small town of about 7k. Everything we needed was only a few miles away. It was a nice place to grow up and quite the opposite of your 5 mega metros.

In a lot of places in the US a teenager without a car might as well be nailed to the floor.

If both parents are working, they can't do after-school activities or extracurriculars. Some can make it work by catching rides, but it's remarkably difficult.

I know this is insane, but that's the world we've got.

I bought my first car with money I earned working a summer job for 500USD. Then I got my second car for free from the same lady because it didn't run. Me and my pops fixed it up and got it on the road.

These were, of course, complete gas guzzling shitboxes that required repair before they could function well. It wasn't until I went away to college that I had something halfway reliable, and that as at 18, and that car had a blown head gasket and needed a valvejob in order to run. It served me well though, ran for another 5 years before I traded it in.

Understand of course, a car in america is freedom and potential. It doesn't just represent that, it is that. America is very, very big and very very spread out compared to europe. That makes public transit an untenable option almost everywhere.

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