The Morning Musing

Here it is, a Wednesday morning once again. And with coffee in hand, I’m as ready as I can be to face the day. But wait…maybe just one more cup!

I started off this morning by reading the mail from the Daily Reckoning, always guaranteed to wake me up with a startling bit of data. Like this…

"The median family has about $3,800 in the bank, does not have a retirement account, and has a home worth $160,000 with a mortgage of $95,000. No mutual funds, stocks or bonds populate their investment portfolios. They make (jointly) $43,000 and struggle to pay off their $2,200 in credit card debt. That means 50% of Americans are in worse shape than the above. It is not a pretty picture." (That also means 50% are in better shape…but the author didn’t mention that.)

And then I read this little bit of news…

“The U.S. Government estimates that the cost of raising a child born today from birth through high school to be $211,370. Raising the standard two children would set an American family back nearly half a million dollars, and these figures do not take university education costs into account. It is this highly-predictable spending by families that drives our modern, mass-affluent economy. This spending continues even during very difficult times, as the first half of this decade has shown."

Whoa! That’s a scary number. And your cost may be higher. Depending on your Zip code of course. But I just thought…that’s over a span of 18 years. And so the $$ number per year, per child is $11,742.777777777777777777777777778. More or less. That’s still a lot of money, but it sounds better than a quarter of a million dollars.

Now, taking a parent’s view of all of this math…children are a bargain! They are priceless!