I have a lot of friends that are becoming (or thinking about becoming) parents. Parenthood isn’t necessarily the straightforward approach it once was. So, I built this interactive blog post / calculator:
🧸 How much does it cost to raise a child from 0 to preschool?
This FinFam View covers my worries I had as an expecting parent, plus a few that I should have thought about sooner. It’s everything I tell my friends we did to get our daughter from the hospital to the Montessori school.
And just for fun, it’ll tell you how much raising a kid in the bay really costs.
A personal connection
Since I became a parent in 2022, I’ve found a special connection with other moms, dads, and prospective parents. We share tips, references to babysitters, and more. Arguably the best social network I’ve ever been part of.
You could say I bring something different to that table. I’m an engineer who didn’t grow up local, or in a huge family. But since day 1, I’ve kept detailed records of our daughter’s development, right down to her feedings and diaper changes.
These days, you can find so much cool stuff to support these habits, from the Hatch smart scale to the Owlet Dream Sock. But in the end, all my data ended up in a spreadsheet.
And for the past 3 years, I’ve been sending that spreadsheet to other parenting-curious folks to give them an idea of what parenting entails. Outside of being 99th percentile in weight and 3rd percentile in height for a couple months, there’s nothing super extraordinary about our daughter. That lack of eventfulness is an asset: She was a baby. Now she’s a “threenager”.
This isn’t your typical Internet parent advice. This was data, with a bit of journaling. Compared to polished parenting blogs, the rawness made it real.
Yet the rawness also made it feel incomplete. I wasn’t content with this special knowledge being buried in another link in The Doc Web. I often thought about doing a write-up, but analysis and polish wasn’t what was lacking.
I didn’t just want to share the data. I wanted to share the hard-won certainty behind the data. That most any friend of mine can handle the workload and obligations that come with parenthood.
And that it’s 100% worth it.
Modeling philosophy
I wanted to retain our lived truth as it were, so I tried to keep the generalization tasteful. We used Kaiser, we live in Japantown San Jose, we had parental leave, then a nanny, then a Montessori school. I pulled the diaper prices from Target last week.
Everything defaults to what would happen if we were to have our daughter in 2025.
Raw data and additional modeling can be found in this spreadsheet here.
That said, you can:
- Play with what it looks like to start formula sooner or later.
- Experiment with starting daycare at 6 months vs getting a nanny.
- Or, if you’re expecting your second, you can see the effect of reusing what you’ve got boxed up in storage.
And more. All told, I’ve put about 12 hours into modeling this particular problem, and I hope to put in even more.
What next?
My child cost view is the biggest FinFam view so far, and supplants the Rent vs Buy View as my go-to flagship view. Rent vs Buy probably has a bigger audience, and more rigorous math, but I struggle to imagine a view with more personal connection. I don’t have a lot more 2700+ data-point datasets just lying around. Unless… 🤔
And while I’m excited to have shared it in this format, I have to say, collecting the data and organizing it into this model has felt really fulfilling. The raw data has become something realer than I had ever imagined. So many learnings captured and crystallized for all, but also for me.
If you have different experiences you want to share, I’d love for you to try out creating a view. It’s super rewarding. If they’re kid-related can even get started by copying this view’s source.
If you’re still wondering my opinion on whether or not you should have a kid, I’ll give you a spoiler: Probably! You read this far, and I think the world needs all the diligently parented kids it can get.
If you’ve got other questions, I’d love to see them on our Q&A board. Til next time!
