After hearing this for years, I assumed we’d be hemorrhaging cash once we had kids. As it turns out, kids have been surprisingly much cheaper than I thought.

It’s very possible to spend exorbitant amounts of money on children, but it’s not a necessity. Obviously, plenty of families are raising kids at the median US income which is vastly lower than what we can make in tech careers.

The internet narrative that kids will destroy your finances has been greatly exaggerated for those of us in tech careers. I suggest everyone considering children take some time to talk to actual prenatal around them rather than assuming the worst from internet anecdotes.

(At least, that's my interpretation of the available data as I put together estimated budgets for the next 5/10/20 years.)

Childcare is expensive, but it's still a fraction of the after-tax compensation of most professional jobs. Recent tax changes have made it even more affordable.

> Most schools or day cares let out around three. If you normally get home between six and seven like most people do then you still need to figure out a few hours of care which means hiring someone.

Every daycare we toured was open until 5-6PM. I don't know anyone who hires additional help for a couple hours in the afternoon. If you're in tech, it's not hard to find a job that allows both parents to stagger their working hours so that one can pick them up.

Around here, it's very common for parents of young children to come into the office early and leave early to pick up kids. It's a common practice and plenty of companies support it.

> So unless you have family nearby who help you raise kids, it can cost a fortune.

Again, this hasn't been my experience nor that of any of my parent friends. Also keep in mind that kids grow up fast and daycare isn't something you need to do forever.

Frankly, most non-parents I know have vastly overestimated how expensive and painful it is to raise kids. This is especially true of those who grew up reading Reddit, where angry /r/childfree posts used to hit the front page with regularity.

All of those changed in some way or other once we started planning to have kids.

It’s also been totally worth it, but that’s beside the financial impact.

That said, it's entirely doable, especially in an age where FAANG companies are paying huge compensation in that area anyway.

Obviously, it doesn't make sense for someone with a median non-tech salary to try to raise multiple kids in one of the most expensive areas in the country. For tech people working tech jobs, it still works out fine though.

That's a pretty dangerous suggestion to anyone contemplating this.

Kids are brutally expensive (in the US at least). Love my kid more than anything in the universe but let's not pretend it's cheap. Current spend is about $30K-$40K per year. Post-tax money of course, so that's ~$80K off the top from gross salary.

And then there's future university costs, which are trending to be more than my entire gross salary per year so not sure how that'll work out.

It helps to know parents with more traditional income levels to see how they function. If you're only surrounded by people spending $80K/year on their kids, it starts to feel like spending that much is the only option. It's not.

If you talk about how expensive it is to own a 6k sq.ft. home, that can be true as well but both seem to speak towards lifestyle inflation rather than the norm.

The irony is that if I could afford a 3Ksqft home (forget 6Ksqft, I can't imagine anyone other than a few CEOs could afford that) I could live in an upscale area where the public schools are great.

Inflation was brutal around 1980. (~14%)

Software development barely existed as a career option and you almost certainly needed a degree to land a job.

When I graduated from engineering grad school in 1981, my highest offer was $27K and that was a sector (oil biz) which was pretty high-flying at the time. That's about $80K today which is certainly not nothing but probably on the low end of what a lot of software developers expect. (I had the good timing to go back to grad school--which had been in the plans anyway--just as the oil biz was entering one of its cyclical downturns.)

I graduated in 1979. Both statements are quite incorrect. Software was paying well at the time, and was remarkable as more than a few in it had no degree, and certainly not a CS degree.

Microsoft only cared about competence.

Hey, I remember that! My mother was retired from the bank she worked at for 40 years when the oil biz blew up in the late '80s.