How expensive are your children?

[PirateWeasel]

I've heard so many conflicting opinions from my friends IRL. Some say babies are the most costly because of high nursery fees. Others say school age because of uniform, extra curricular stuff etc, and others say teenagers because they want high tech gizmos, driving lessons and so on...

So apparently kids are always going to cost shedloads of money whatever age they are! But I'm curious to hear your experiences of which stages you found the toughest financially. I need to prepare myself... and my wallet! 😂

I spend £8500 a year on nursery for DS.
By the time he’s ready for school, I’ll have spent over £22k on nursery alone. He’ll be 5.

He’s not expensive. The system is - it’s fucked. My salary is very average so this has been an appalling couple of years financially.

I was a SAHM when DS was younger so never needed childcare thankfully & I expect the most expensive years are about to hit now that DS is (hopefully) going to uni. I didn’t find the teenage years particularly expensive, he had a monthly allowance (£50 a month at 18) and if he wanted designer labels he knew he had to save up Christmas & birthday money so we never bought expensive clothing for him, actually don’t think we have bought any clothing or shoes for him since he was 15. . DS has always had part time jobs from 14. & budgets well. But uni maintenance costs will be expensive.

Being a sahm is extremely expensive, if you add up theist salary. Home education similar, the most expensive form of education

Oh I forgot got the £20k on ivf
Oh yes, there was the cost of being assessed for intercountry adoption, forgot that!

We had no childcare costs as I was a SAHM (3 dc 3 and under) and actually managed to save money. All clothes were second hand, no holidays, no big expenditures, those were the best days of my life. I have 3 teens now and it is like pouring money down the drain. The school uniforms alone are an annual holiday budget. Ds is very hard on clothes and got through 2 school blazers so far this year and I just discovered a hole in the elbow. They are £150+ a go (wool). Size 10 shoes are £70+ and he needs at least 4 different pairs for school per year. I am very fortunate they are not demanding but I now hide food as ds eats like there is no tomorrow. The best bit is that as I was a SAHP for years I am starting all over again career wise 😭

But when you were a sahm you gave up a salary so that's a big cost. Eg if you earned £50k then the cost of being a sahm was £50k per year in lost earnings

Teenagers. I have 2. The amount of food they eat is ridiculous, they eat quicker than I can fill the fridge.
School uniform is so expensive and even worse that they need 4 different p.e kits - then all the school trips, books and various things the school 'need' help with funding, DD is in year 10 and I've had to pay the school for the privilege of her doing work experience.
Then clothes, shoes, tech, phones, going out with friends, bus fares, toiletries, there always seems to be something that needs paying for. I have one of each so can't do hand me downs either.

But when you were a sahm you gave up a salary so that's a big cost.

Yeah - I don't get all these "I was a SAHM so no childcare costs" posts - that's a whole lost income plus lost pension contributions and pay rises/promotions. Unless you're a very low earner, that is a lot of money!

Unless you're a very low earner, that is a lot of money!

I was a very low earner. We had twins, so the childcare costs would have been more than double my salary.

But it's still a cost even if a very low earner. And a missed opportunity to study or retrain for something else. It's not totally free childcare

I assumed the thread was about the direct costs of ‘how expensive are your children’, you can go round in circles if you include the loss of income etc. . In many ways we didn’t spend nearly as much money when we had a child as we had less expensive holidays, rarely ate out or went to expensive activities, as a ‘low’ earner ( really, with the average salary being £27k how many of us are on around £50k ?). Still managed to pay off our mortgage in our mid 40s.

Everyone’s experience of the expenses of children is different, personally we haven’t found it that expensive (up until uni years) but we don’t buy designer clothes, pay for our DS’s social life, buy these mysterious ‘toiletries’ that so many teenagers seem to need and he doesn’t have a particularly large appetite. I think we are very fortunate (or tight!). I’ve said this before on Mumsnet but the one thing we have done for our DS is to set up a pension fund for him since birth, I consider that a very good long term investment.

Don't they just cost more or less everything you have, however much that might be?

I think this is the answer!

Preschool years were really expensive - we did stuff like stop paying pensions for a bit, skipped on things like pet insurance, basically cut expenses to the bone if we could and did free stuff for entertainment.

Now we pay loads on extracurricular activities, and their extra costs due uniform/exam fees/etc, ‘educational’ days out, a stop in a cafe for a coffee is no longer a babycinno and a bite of my tea cake but a proper drink for everyone and either no snacks or snacks for all, school trips and lunches and general semi-compulsory spending like PTA school fairs (aka hand over all your cash for cake stalls, raffles and entry fees), birthday gifts for their friends, new bikes every 18 months, and so on.

Whilst it’s cheaper than the preschool years I expect, it doesn’t feel like it! And I expect this will be the same for the teen years. The spending pattern and cost will be different but feel just as costly.

In the end you just cut your cloth and are grateful to be able to afford what you can, I suppose. It is part of the reason we stopped at 2 DC, though.

It's not totally free childcare

You’re right, it’s not free. And obviously the cost/benefit ratio varies massively depending on what you’re making to begin with. In our case, though, me giving up a part time charity sector job to stay home with three young kids for four years saved us over 60k in childcare costs, which is probably why (in answer to the OP’s original question) we did not feel that those years were a major financial strain. If I had been making more to begin with and we had been depending on that money, it would have been a very different story.

I assumed the thread was about the direct costs of ‘how expensive are your children’, you can go round in circles if you include the loss of income etc.

Giving up a salary to look after children would feel like a direct cost to me - I would notice it in exactly the same way as nursery costs.

Late teens/young adults
Cars
Homes
Clothes
Uni costs
Phones

I will never retire

Being a sahm is much more expensive than paying for childcare.

DS1 is starting secondary school in sept and the costs are already stacking up uniform and bus pass is going to clear £1k and that's just a standard state school before we get on to trips or extra curricular stuff
For his birthday next month he's getting a new bike as he's grown out of the last one - now he needs an adult one.
DS is heading towards getting a bit cheaper as he will get some free hours at nursery next year but we had to get a new car when he was born to fit him in so that was a massive expense

I think the expenses just change though and it depends on what you count - bigger house or car, more people to feed, more people to take on holiday, the hit your earnings take (I know this doesn't apply to everyone but definitely applies to me), child care, activities

Being a sahm is much more expensive than paying for childcare.

Depends how much you earned when you worked doesn’t it?

Oh my gosh, so much food for thought in all these posts! I've just read some of them out to DH and he's now gone very pale and has stopped banging on about upgrading his car. So thank you to everyone just for saving me from having to pretend to be interested in his unutterably boring engine statistics! 🙌

With dd1 the uni years are coming out as most expensive, she's costing a lot in topping up her loan (and she's restarting first year again, so making it a 5 year expense rather than the 4 it was supposed to be). But when she was little I had family providing the childcare, my dad was retired and asked to look after her, which he did a brilliant job of doing.

With dd2 the preschool years are the most expensive. By the time she came along my dad's health meant he couldn't do ft childcare, so we used a cm. Our cm is lovely, and I don't begrudge her a penny, but ft childcare costs, we paid about £700 a month. Even at uni, I'm not paying £700 a month on dd1.

I didn't fund expensive clothing or expensive hobbies for dd1 in her later childhood or teen years, so I won't be funding that for dd2 either. If they want expensive things that's what Christmas, birthdays and saving your pocket money is for. I provide the basics, and will pay for activities like one (relatively cheap) sport, brownies/guides/similar, and lessons on one instrument through school.

If either of them ever needed a tutor for school, or counseling they couldn't access through the nhs, we would find that money, but we would class that as a need rather than a want.

It's probably been mentioned many times over but I forgot it in my post.

School trips abroad in GCSE years, they're technically jollies with an educational slant. They usually start at around £600 and increase from there. Then there's spending money, new clothes etc. Even worse when they do two GCSE subjects that both have a foreign trip in the same year...

Christ I just thank god I've only got one teen left, maybe we can finally spend some money on us

I found having 2 babies close together fairly pricey because I chose to pay two lots of childcare rather than stay at home.
Now they are young primary and I have been promoted I am not finding them too expensive. They do relatively inexpensive activities like brownies and swimming and they're not brilliant at anything yet (although I can see swimming getting more and more expensive as DD has just got into a club). dH and I are able to do most pick ups and drop offs between us so I pay just £44 per week during term time for a childminder.

I fully anticipate the teenage and uni years to be most expensive with the type of clothes/gadgets they want and the activities and holidays that they prefer. Supporting through uni if they go looks expensive. So I'm trying to enjoy them now as I realise I'm probably in the least expensive phase !

Mine will be most expensive when they get to Uni. They will be going to schools in the US, and so I'm estimating at least 80,000 per year per child then.

I have a 10 month old and nursery fees are eye watering, but one of us stopping work would be an even bigger hit.

In terms of everything else, she's not that expensive - mostly because she has a cousin who is one clothes size up from her at all times so we get nearly all her clothes for nothing bar the few bits I see and can't resist.

Nursery provide her food, nappies, wipes, nappy cream 4 days a week so we only need those things for 3 days.

Can imagine it will cost us a lot still when she gets to school age in before/after school clubs and food etc.

Maybe we should be having 'teen showers' instead of baby showers..