Now that it’s been a year of having two kids, I have a good grasp now of how much extra our two kids (ages 4 and 1) are adding to our monthly budget, which I hope can help others when they are budgeting and planning their personal finances to include children.
Rent / housing: Without the two kids, we’d require fewer bedrooms, so I’d say our housing budget doubled because of them, but also, we doubled it with the first child hoping we’d have a second. So most of the increase happens upfront. Let’s call this a few thousand dollars.
Childcare: I’ve broken down on this blog post how much childcare costs
Groceries: It’s a bit hard to separate out what our kids eat vs. what we eat, but I’d say that our kids probably added another ~$300 a month on top of what we regularly spend on groceries
Formula and diapering: I have the misfortune of a 4 year old who is still having a lot of accidents. And I just stopped giving formula to the 1 year old, who is very much still in diapers. I estimate that these two things added about $200 a month to the budget, but will disappear over time.
Takeout / babysitting: We are so lucky that the in laws are the babysitters. We rely on their help a lot, and we get take-out food to treat them whenever they babysit, and also get takeout on nights when I’m too tired from depression to make food. This is estimated at around ~$300-500 a month
Sundries, supplies, etc: Thankfully with two relatively healthy kids, good healthcare coverage, and uniforms at school, there’s not a lot of spending here, call it maybe $50 a month.
Travel: We have not yet started bringing our kids out on vacations by a lot, and we’d travel hack a lot of it when we can, but I definitely see this adding a few hundred a month when we get there.
Outside of housing, childcare, and travel, which I think can vary a lot based on where you are in the US, I think it’s very reasonable to assume that most children add about $500-1000 a month in extra costs for basic things. For many of my coaching clients, I typically use $1,000 a month per child as a starting point.
