I went this route, but question the wisdom of it as I age. My grandma is 103 in a nursing home. I don’t know how all of that would have been navigated without her kids helping to get that setup and working on her behalf.
This is why the world is starting to suffer from the age demographic bomb as we speak. Retirees are starting to outnumber working adults. Soon they will outnumber everyone and the financial sustainability of pensions like social security and socialized healthcare like Medicare will come into question. The problem becomes worse when voters are no longer ok with using immigration to mitigate it.
This surely helps. Until your kids are 5 or so, you don't know if you'll have huge birth-related medical bills, unexpected disabilities/chronic illnesses, or special needs that require moving to an expensive school district.
And even assuming everything is good on that front, you're still looking at $300-400k in college tuition (in 2024 dollars) if you let your kids pick any school. You can tell them that you can only afford a community college or inexpensive public school, but how many parents would feel comfortable doing that after retiring at a very young age?
I guess you can bundle the message with a reminder that the reason you were around a ton when they were growing up was because you FIRE'd, but given how oppositional teens can be, I'd expect that this would cause resentment in a lot of cases.
I always wonder why it doesn't make sense to just have them learn German or French and then have them study in continental Europe. Living standard is the same, tuition cost is mostly non-existent and living abroad, if just for a year, will make you a better person.
Total cost for a bachelor + master is maybe 5 years with a cost of 1.5k per month maximum (this is considered rich for students), so you're at 18k per year or 90k total.
> And even assuming everything is good on that front, you're still looking at $300-400k in college tuition (in 2024 dollars) if you let your kids pick any school.
When people ask if I want a second kid I reply that my current child costs me around 64k a year and I cannot afford a second!
28k for a neighborhood daycare, 36k for college savings, and that is baseline before anything else.
al_borland|1 year ago
chaostheory|1 year ago
gnicholas|1 year ago
And even assuming everything is good on that front, you're still looking at $300-400k in college tuition (in 2024 dollars) if you let your kids pick any school. You can tell them that you can only afford a community college or inexpensive public school, but how many parents would feel comfortable doing that after retiring at a very young age?
I guess you can bundle the message with a reminder that the reason you were around a ton when they were growing up was because you FIRE'd, but given how oppositional teens can be, I'd expect that this would cause resentment in a lot of cases.
dmichulke|1 year ago
I always wonder why it doesn't make sense to just have them learn German or French and then have them study in continental Europe. Living standard is the same, tuition cost is mostly non-existent and living abroad, if just for a year, will make you a better person.
Total cost for a bachelor + master is maybe 5 years with a cost of 1.5k per month maximum (this is considered rich for students), so you're at 18k per year or 90k total.
Educational arbitrage.
devbent|1 year ago
When people ask if I want a second kid I reply that my current child costs me around 64k a year and I cannot afford a second!
28k for a neighborhood daycare, 36k for college savings, and that is baseline before anything else.
College tuition is obscene.
citizen_friend|1 year ago
This is a ridiculous exaggeration.
nunez|1 year ago