Becoming foster parents was the best decision we ever made.

The premise of the film is natural selection is indifferent toward intelligence. People who have limited intelligence out-breed intellectuals and the resulting future society is full of stupid people.

NOW that I am 53 and have two married, self-supporting sons and two grandson, I am glad I had kids in my early twenties, within four years of graduating from college.

And boy howdy do they EVER think that their Dad and I have gone up sixty or so IQ points since they were kids! Nothing like becoming a parent to make you appreciate your own and their sacrifices.

How true! We did start 3 years later (yes, the biological clock does have to be taken into consideration), we have been through lay-offs, family health problems, extended family issues, etc. Life happens.

You wanna know how long the mortgage took to be paid off? 15 years. We did pay extra, but would then refinance as the rates came down. We took out extra each time so we could update electric, put more energy efficient windows in, erect a fence for my daycare business (I had to continue to bring in income, but I did feel strongly about raising our own kids…), buy a much needed used car, etc.

The lady at the bank was right. We have never reached a point where we could COMFORTABLY AFFORD kids, but somehow we made ends meet, took cheapo vacations (we talk about our camping trip fiasco much more than the expensive Disney World trip! Camping proved to be a disaster for us, but pretty darned funny in hindsight), became debt-free just in time for the kids to go off to college & got the kids through college (that earned income credit helped us pay our half of the tuition – the kids earned their half and seeing us live frugally, THEY TOO understand the importance of frugality & debt-free living as well).

Just make sure the hubby and wife are one the same page & that they understand that parenthood is a tough but fulfilling undertaking, and present a united front to the kids and things will probably work out. Good luck!

The fact that it allegedly takes kids to bring about this shift for so many people is one of humanity’s major challenges.

1) what is the cost of daycare in your area?

2) school district doesn’t matter until your child is old enough to go to school. I mentioned that my parents lived in a tiny one bedroom garage apartment when my brother and I were babies. If you can maintain a similar or just slightly inflated lifestyle after the birth of your child until it is 5/6 years old you might be able to get an earlier start than what you are currently anticipating while continuing to put away savings for your desired home. My parents didn’t buy their first home until just before I started kindergarten. They’ve now been in that house for ~22 years.

3) are there rentals in/near the neighborhood you are interested (houses, apartments?) If you’re still not quite ready to buy when the kid hits 5/6 years old, this might be another way of getting into the school district you want while continuing to save. My dad has a friend who lived in apartments until the his kids graduated and left, and *then* he finally went and bought himself house (I’m not sure if it was in the same neighborhood). Maybe he was doing #2 and keeping his kids in a good school district within his desired budget and then he got out of there once he no longer needed it.

4) Does your projected home budget include the cost of replacing things that break (pipes, AC, heater, foundations, etc)? I don’t see a child care line (co-pays for well baby, said daycare unless you stay home), buying furniture when you jump from a 1-bedroom apartment to a 3bedroom-2bath house…

I am 27 and my husband is 29. We have been together 5-years and are in a very strong healthy and committed relationship. We both want kids. Actually, I have wanted kids since we met, but told my ovaries to be patient until I finished law school and my husband finished getting his MBA. Now, degrees in hand, we have approx. $90,000 in student loan debt combined. We have $25,000 in savings and are saving a little over $2,500 a month by living frugally and in a tiny one bedroom apartment. I make $45,000 a year and my husband makes $47,500. We have been forgoing paying down our student loan debt because we want to buy a home. The plan is to buy a home in a good school district so we won’t have to pay for private school later. We also don’t plan on moving at least for 10-15 years. The homes we are looking at are about $250,000-$270,000, which are 3b/2bath homes. We both have excellent credit and qualify for a home purchase in that ball park and we plan on taking out an FHA loan.

My projected budget with the new home is the following:

Mortgage: $2,400

Loans: $900

Utilities: $ 200

Transportation $ 200

Food: $250

Car Ins: $150

Tv and internet: $90

Phones $60

Misc. $200

= $4,450

Take home pay is $5,735 – (this is after our 401k contributions are taken out and health insurance)

If we have a child now, which we really want to do, I will have to keep working and have to pay for day care. (There aren’t any family members who we could rely on for help.)
I want to know from your experiences, if I should wait or pull the trigger and start baby making. lol I love my husband and I know finances hurts marriages and I am scared of that. I feel like I may be wanting too much too soon, but I also feel like I have done everything I have been told to do to be ready and yet, there seems like a never ending list of to-dos and maybe I will never be ready. I waited for the right man, I waited until I was done with school, and I waited to be at my job for at least a year to make sure I had a steady source of income and that I wanted to stay with the firm and have Maternity leave. Ugh! But, I don’t have a lot of savings. Suggestions?

PS: We have two cars paid off and I am selling one, which should net me about 10k. I intend to save this money as an emergency fund. We both work in downtown so we car pool. Additionally, the house price is the absolute cheapest for a good school district. Otherwise, we are talking about worse neighborhoods and longer commutes.

Still… it is worth thinking about how old you’ll be when your child turns 18, or 21, or gets married themselves.

I’ll be 40 when my daughter is 18. I’ll be (she hopes) a grandmother before I’m 55. One of my good friends on the otherhand is pregnant with her first. When she is 55 her child won’t have graduated highschool yet.

I can’t even imagine dealing with that!

And finances alone are not the way to judge whether this is the right time for you to become a family. Bottom line is, if you have children, you make adjustments to your lifestyle in one way or another. If you decide to stay home, you have to learn to live on one income. If you decide that both parents will work, you have to find money for daycare. You will always have to do some fine tuning no matter what your situation.

Andi – Even though your lives are in flux, moving from city to city, job to job, to pursue your dreams, you said yourself that you are both emotionally ready to start a family. And in a nutshell that is the most important thing. You love each other, you know you’re in this for the long haul TOGETHER and you’re ready to devote your time and energy into loving and raising another human being. So it is the right time for you!

While some might say, you don’t have a permanent home, you don’t have permanent jobs, its reckless – I say, its probably a really good time!! You haven’t committed yourself to a mortgage – any change to your income levels could affect the security of that. If you have a family now, while you’re living on less income, building careers, then the only way for your finances to go is up. Eventually.

Yes having children can be expensive – but it doesn’t have to be. It is all about what you want for your children and for your family. If you start out living on less, having less, you will manage. And when your incomes increase, your situations change, you feel the need to provide your children with a permament home while they go to school – you will do so within your means.

Waiting until you feel you can “afford” children could easily mean you wait too long and miss out. Or have only 1 child when maybe you’d really like 4. You will have also grown accustomed to a certain way of life with 2 growing incomes and the adjustment to prioritizing another human being (or more) will be harder felt.

So if you’re ready, do it. You will find a way and your child will have your hearts and your energy (while you are young enough to still have some left – because believe me having kids is EXHAUSTING! I am 38, have a 3yr old, am pregnant again and working parttime and I have never felt more tired). Even if your wallets are empty, your lives will be full.

But you definitely want to have some health insurance. Birthing babies in America is darned expensive! Keeping them, raising them and nurturing them after the big day can be as inexpensive as you choose.

Good luck!

http://www.nndb.com/people/427/000022361/

Personally I wouldn’t want to follow any of her advice given how well that’s worked out for her… in addition to it being pretty stupid and designed for the main purpose of making money for her, something she does very well. Which is kind of ironic for someone who preaches that women should stay in the home and be submissive to their husbands.

And just because some ideologue uses a ridiculous phrase doesn’t mean you have to keep parroting it. Once you use it in all seriousness you make it yours. Just because you didn’t invent it doesn’t make it any less offensive.

I called you a troll, I didn’t call you stupid. There’s differences between calling someone stupid and saying that their arguments are stupid. It is important to be able to differentiate the two… or you’re just going to spend your life feeling awfully stupid.

But go ahead and play the victim. You’re attempting to hurt people every time you say that daycares are baby farms or day orphanages. If people saying that’s ridiculous makes you into a victim, well, so be it. Feel like a victim. You have my blessing.

Just note that if you stop saying such stupid things, people will stop calling you on them. And the world will be a much better place.

And in many ways I find that to be true. Even my own retirement savings is thought about in a “I don’t want to be a burden to my daughter when I am old” kind of way, instead of a “what do I want/need when I am old” way.

When I had my daughter I was a single 21 year old, first year university student. I made $6,000 that year, and rent took up most of that, so she certainly cost me every penny that year!

But now that I am financially stable, life style creap has meant that while I am saving more, I am also spending (a lot) more… and now we take more vacations, see more live theatre, wear nicer clothing, etc. etc. And so she still costs me every dollar I make!

What part of “stick the child in a day orphanage/baby farm unless it’s absolutely financially necessary” is not trollish? Especially since you have used this exact statement before in previous threads and seemed to relish the argument that came from it. That’s the DEFINITION of troll. Now you’re demanding an apology, presumably to increase arguments and divisiveness. Again, definition of troll. Yes, I know I shouldn’t feed the troll, but I also don’t like the way letting comments like yours stand makes working mothers feel guilty when they have NO REASON to feel guilty.

The argument that sending a kid to daycare keeps kids from bonding is stupid, ridiculous, and without any scientific foundation. I strongly suggest you read Our Babies, Ourselves for the research. It’s by an anthropologist and has plenty of stuff on “bonding” and child-rearing. Not that that is going to make a difference, since you’re just a troll.

The argument that ‘In your need to keep your children out of a “day orphanage/baby farm” your children were not able to actually get all the attention that they need. They spent more time sleeping and less time interacting than is needed for proper stimulation and bonding,’ is also a stupid argument, even though it is one that could be made with the same justification.

For less judgmental parents, I say that most parents do what works for their own families. Kids are resilient and flexible. They get a lot out of multiple care providers, they get a lot out of spending time with parents.

Though kids can get kind of nasty things out of spending 100% of their time with judgmental parents, as I witnessed this weekend at my cousin’s wedding– his parents refused to attend or let his sibling attend because he was marrying in the Lutheran church rather than Catholic. He recently got hit by a roadside bomb while serving in Afghanistan too. Somehow he turned out ok, even with the judgmental parents, and we have hope for one of his sisters as well. The mom also gave me a lecture about “baby farming” *at my grandmother’s funeral* a couple of years ago, although my son was obviously much better behaved than her grandkids, and was obviously deeply bonded with his daddy. Also at the funeral one of her teenage daughters kept sneaking outside to smoke weed and cigarettes, but although she seemed to want to be caught, her parents, including her judgmental SAHM, turned a blind eye. The rest of us, with our high-powered professional mothers, who attended daycare etc, seem to have turned out fine without drug, emotional etc. problems. It’s sad, really. I hope you’re not doing that to your kids with your “one way.”

Still, I don’t think my parents should have caved and bought me Stuff so that I could fit in.

On a related note, I’m surprised how many people have unequivocally touted a parent staying home as a cost savings measure. Even if you allow a generous $2K a month for day care, and a generous 50% for taxes and expenses, you’re still losing more money if the stay-at-home parent was making more than $50K a year (and that’s before you factor in future lowered earnings, retirement and benefits). Make the choice that’s right for you personally, but everything has a cost.

If I could guarantee everything would work out? Sure, I might do it. But I can’t, and having seen it first hand I’m not willing to roll those dice right now (and maybe not ever).

Everyone’s different, and there’re PLENTY of mothers who don’t want to stay at home, even if it would save them money.

Duh. This argument has been argued many, many a time.

Being pretty much free of credit card debt

Buying a house and settling in

Having some money put away for retirement

Having our own business up and running so we can work at home and raise our child more easily (this was the biggest one).

I agree that young kids need shelter, clean water, nutritious food, medical care, and lots of love. Anything else is just extras!

Daisy

1) Don’t take your kids with you to the store (the grocery store, Target, etc.) Leave the kid at home with the other parent while you run errands. Stores product-place their kid-friendly items at the child’s eye-level.

2) When you kid starts asking for an iPhone or an XBox(it will happen sooner than you think!), work out a plan in which they “earn” the upfront cost of the item and/or they “earn” the ongoing cost of the monthly plan by doing chores around the house.

3) When the kid gets a little older (around 7 or 8), you can also offer them the chance to EITHER spend their chores-money on stuff (like a phone) OR “invest it” in the Mom and Dad Certificate of Deposit which yields them “interest” or “dividends.”

If we knew then that we’d be spending thousands of dollars in infertility treatments, and enduring years of disappointments and life “on hold”, we’d have had kids “right away”, or at least not waited.

The main thing is to have good health insurance, and having a flexible work schedule is a plus.

It wouldn’t hurt to have your hormone levels checked out (like FSH) IF you don’t get pregnant within 1 year.

My advice is: don’t wait any longer. 5 years of marriage is perfect. You’ll never be more ready.
Good Luck!