[F32Fleet]

Originally Posted by dradernh

When I suggested to a friend in the mid-00s that raising a child in the upper middle class to age 18 cost $250K in after-tax dollars (a number I'd read in the WSJ a decade earlier), he looked me right in the eye and very quickly brought me up to speed. It wasn't a quarter of a million after-tax dollars any more, he said, it was one-third of a million dollars. Per child. After tax.

Mind you, that's to set the child up to win economically for the rest of his or her life – to be one of the 10%. After that, of course, it's up to the kid to make the grade.

This wasn't a family splashing-out in any visible way, and I didn't ask for a breakdown, but I found that to be a very sobering number. The wife and I were well beyond having kids by then (we chose not to have them decades before), but it did give us an appreciation for what parents wanting their kids to have - not the very best of everything by any means, but a fair shot at most of what our country has to offer - had to pay to make that happen.

Ditto