Prior to our financial meltdown, my wife and I simply never sat down and talked about our finances. Right after our meltdown, we talked about things almost every day, but through our recovery, our discussions have slowly reduced themselves to the point where we’re effectively already having monthly family financial meetings.

And these meetings have become a big part of the financial glue of our marriage.

These conversations keep us on the same financial page and ensure that we both are open and clear about our goals, our dreams, our mistakes, our challenges, and our shared path in life. They let us constantly be a check against one another, making sure we both stick to our better behaviors and use each other as an inspiration for making good choices. If you’re in a long-term relationship with someone, I can’t possibly recommend a monthly financial meeting more highly.

What Our Meetings Look Like

Our meetings are really pretty simple. We go through any credit card statements and bill statements that we have, talk about any changes we should make, plan for anything that’s coming up, and set some goals for the next month, mostly along the lines of limiting unnecessary spending and deciding where our budget leftovers will go for the next month.

For the most part, we don’t need any sort of specific agenda or meeting time - we just do it every once in a while on roughly a monthly schedule. Some keys:

Everything is an open book. There should be absolutely no secrets in such a meeting. If your spouse wants to know about a specific spending choice, be completely open about it, not defensive. If you’re getting defensive, that means you have something to hide - and that means there’s a problem that needs to be addressed together.

Make goals a big part of the meeting. Not only big, long-term goals, but the shorter goals over the next month that will help you get there. Set goals together, even if the goals are very individual in nature. Then, throughout the month, offer each other encouragement. It’s hard to break a bad spending habit or to make new financial choices - use the motivation of goals and the constant encouragement of a loving partner to make the changes easier.

This is a great time to work on a simple budget together. Sit down and talk in detail about your spending plan for the coming month - and also where your challenges and successes were over the last month. This discussion can provide a lot of insight into where you’re going - and where you’ve been - and that information together can help you to make better financial choices.

Love and respect each other, even if you have differences of opinion. Money brings about strong feelings - don’t let these strong feelings overshadow the more important things in life. One good way to do this is to hold your partner’s hand during the meeting.

Involving the Kids

I am a big advocate of involving children in these meetings as early as possible, by age seven at the latest. Allow them to bring their own financial picture to the table - pay them an allowance, have them budget the money, and have them talk about their own successes. Here are some thoughts on how to incorporate kids into this picture.

Keep the open book philosophy. Everything should still be wide open so that your kids can see the financial reality of being adults. They need to know how much you’re spending each month to keep the roof over their head and the food on the table - as well as giving an idea of all of the little expenses that eat away at the big pile of money.

What about privacy? Many parents like to hide behind a veil of privacy, saying that it’s none of their children’s business how they spend their money. My argument against that is twofold: first, it makes a great educational opportunity for your kids impossible and second, it says that there’s something in your spending that you’re ashamed of. If there’s shame, that means that there’s something you personally need to improve in your life.

Naturally, I see no problem eliminating a few items with black highlighter in order to hide an upcoming gift or something, but if you’re sealing away most of your spending from your children, they’re missing out on a big learning opportunity.

Let them offer input towards goals - and have them set their own. When you’re making large financial choices, let them have a voice in the decision, but don’t let them run the show, either. Where you should allow them a lot of control is in setting their own goals, both over the long term and over the next month. Help them identify good things to save for and encourage them to work towards those goals. This goes hand in hand with the idea of splitting an allowance into pieces for spending now, sharing with others, and saving for later - in effect, budgeting for kids.

Make some of the economic choices you have available to them. This is a concept heavily advocated by David Owen’s excellent book The First National Bank of Dad. In it, Owen advocates that you should create a “virtual” bank for your kids with a very high interest rate - say, 5% a month - to teach them the value of saving very early. In other words, let’s say they have $20. They have the choice of putting that $20 in the “First National Bank of Dad” where it will earn $1 in interest every month, or they can spend it immediately. All they have to do to earn that $1 each month is simply not spend it. It’s a real choice for a young child and it introduces them to the dilemma of saving versus spending - and offers plenty of encouragement to make the “good” choice.

In The End…
At its core, the idea of a monthly money meeting is really all about communication. The more we talk about money with our family and the more we encourage each other to make good choices, the more likely we are to make good choices over the long haul. Even better, it’s a splendid opportunity to use ourselves as examples for our children, teaching them how to be financially responsible adults.

I’m worried about my grandmother’s finances. She lives on Social Security and a small pension from the state, but if that were all there was to her story, it would be fine - she owns her residence and is just fine in terms of taxes and debt. The problem is that her oldest son still lives with her and is a constant drain on her financial state. He’s simply incapable of holding down a job.

My grandmother is far too caring of a person to allow one of her children to be out on the street, so she allows him to live with her and has likely agreed to leave her home to him when she passes on.

The end result of this situation is that there are two adults living on a small pension and one person’s Social Security benefits. This worries me and makes me sad on a daily basis - I think about her and really wish there were a way I could help her with her situation. The only problem is that if I do financially assist her, that assistance will translate directly into spending money for her son, who I don’t really want to help because of how he’s draining away my grandmother’s golden years.

A big part of me wants to intrude in this situation. I want to somehow be able to storm in the door and somehow make everything all right for my grandmother.

In the end, though, this intrusion would serve no real purpose. She’s a grown woman with a caring heart who has the power to make her own choices, and she chooses to spend her extra money taking care of her son. It has very little to do with how I feel about it - it’s really her choice, not mine.

I hear often from readers who are faced with a similar situation in their own lives. They see a financial mess in the life of someone they care about and they desperately want to intrude in it. Much of the time, I feel like they’re writing to me for “permission” - some sort of approval of their intrusion.

My reaction is pretty much always the same: don’t intrude unless it directly affects you and even then, only intrude in business to the extent that you need to to protect yourself. Don’t stick your nose into someone else’s business - all you’ll do is create resentment and almost always you’ll fail to solve the problem you wish to address. Often, you’ll make the problem worse.

Instead, just let the people you care about know that you’ll help them if they need it, in the form of advice or financial assistance or whatever the situation calls for. Sit down with just that person (or persons), let them know that you care for them, and let them know that you want to help them specifically, but don’t push them. Let them make the choice - it is their life, after all.

Of course, some situations demand that you protect yourself, and you should always take any measures you feel are necessary to protect yourself. Just make sure that everyone involved in that protection is on the same page - that means, if you’re married, talk over such decisions with your spouse.

As for my grandmother, I talk to her on the phone every week and I’ve had a few conversations with just her about her situation, just letting her know that if she ever needs anything at all, I’m just a phone call away and I’ll help her in any way that I can. But I won’t make her pick up that phone - it’s her life to lead and her choices to make, even if I don’t agree with the choices.

A really good discussion about personal trust and honesty developed out of the most recent reader mailbag that I thought was worth discussing on its own. First of all, I made a pretty big mistake in my answer. I made a giant assumption that the readers called me on, and it’s worth discussing further.

On a very regular basis, I give cash gifts to people I trust who need them or could, at the very least, use them. I take this out of money that I have and just give it to people that could use it. I’ll give some cash to a relative to help that person cover their power bill. This is something that’s common and normal to me.

When I do this, I am pretty picky about who I give the cash to, but if they’re someone I trust personally, I don’t hesitate to do it. If I found out my grandmother was having difficulty keeping her house, I’d be right there with a check in hand to help her. If one of my cousins that I trust was trying to start a business and needed some seed money, a check would be in the mail in a heartbeat. I almost always do this without asking, and I don’t expect a dime back from them.

Why do I do this? I don’t need any sort of written agreement to know that if I needed something, these people I trust would be there for me. When those people are in a pinch, I will help them, no questions asked. When those people are trying to reach for a dream, I will try to boost them if I can.

To me, personal trust and personal relationships like these are more valuable than money. I can’t possibly put a cash value on knowing that if I lost my home, my family, my children, my job - everything - there are people who would take me in and care for me. I was able to make the leap to being a full time writer because of the support and trust and help given to me by family and friends. I rely on this - it’s an integral part of who I am.

Here’s another way to think about it, through the eyes of charities. I tend to not donate to charities unless I know them well. I need to either be intimately involved myself or have someone I deeply trust be involved before I’ll donate. When I do build that trust, though, I’ll write checks to those charities without even thinking. I’ll evangelize for those charities. I’ll do what I can to help them, because I trust them. I don’t worry any more about whether my check is really helping - I trust the charity, so I don’t worry about it. I don’t worry about what I’ll get out of it - I just trust that they’re doing the right thing for something I care about.

Quite often, I assume the same kinds of dynamics in other families and friendships - and I did so to my own detriment earlier. My response to a reader question about what to do with extra cash was to give it away to a trusted family member or a trusted friend, which is exactly what I would do. I’d look for someone I trusted and use that money to seed something they wanted to do, and I’d be very liberal about it.

My response, which basically just assumed much of this, said to give the cash to a trusted family member and then that family member would probably help with college. I also suggested that giving this money away - because it would provide the added kicker of helping with one’s financial aid case, might be unethical to some, but I considered it completely fair because it’s within the rules - nowhere does it outlaw giving away your money. I did not advocate sheltering money - that’s against the rules entirely.

This was met with instant derision that I was advocating truly cheating the system, and looking back on it, I can see where the outrage came from. The outrage comes from the sense that you should never trust anyone when it comes to money, and that’s a sensible and safe philosophy to live by. The only drawback is that you limit yourself in how much you can trust others, and that cuts you off from some things. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? It’s a personal call each person has to make.

A reader asked me:

Let’s turn the tables. If you randomly received a check for $10,000 in the mail from a relative with no note, what would you do with it? What do you think they would want you do to with it?

I’d probably call them up and ask them why they sent it. If they said, “It’s help for you getting started with your writing career” or something like that, I’d give a big “thank you” and put it in the bank. I can think of a lot of other reasons why I’d just happily accept the gift, and they’re mostly borne out of trust and long-term trusting relationships with people.

Honestly, I wouldn’t really question the gift very much, and this in itself is a demonstration of what I’m talking about.

Furthermore, I’m planning already to give my nieces and nephews some gifted financial help when they go to college. I have no obligation to do so. But their parents have helped me a lot during my young adult life.

Should that be reported on the FAFSA? I think it’s ridiculous to think so. There was no implication whatsoever that any help my brother or sister-in-law gave me, in the form of gifts or personal help or advice, was to be repaid in the form of some assistance to their children. If they had a windfall and mailed me a check right now without a note, I’d still not think of it as any sort of implication that I should assist their children with college.

This all translates directly to my advice to the earlier family. In essence, giving that money to Uncle Phil is just another kind of investment. It’s an investment in people, in trust, in a bond that can’t be quoted in dollars. If you give that money to Phil when he has a good use for it, you’ve probably cemented a bond with someone who will help you in countless ways throughout your life, in ways you see now and ways you don’t, in ways you can measure in dollars and cents and ways you can’t.

From my perspective, trust is about helping people you care for because you can and because you want to, not because you’re obligated to.

If this kind of trust seems alien to you, then you’re not alone. There are a lot of people out there who are guarded, and it’s usually because they’ve been bitten after trusting someone, or they’ve heard too many stories about trust falling apart. They call such trust “naive” or “foolish” - and maybe it is.

But when I go back to my hometown and spend an evening around people I trust that deeply, I realize I wouldn’t trade that sense of trust for anything in the world. It’s that valuable, if you can find it.

So what did I learn? First, I learned that assuming things about the relationships between others can usually get you into hot water. I assumed far too much about the trust in relationships in this family, and because of that, I gave advice that was probably not the best advice to give. I gave advice from my own heart, based on what I would do in that situation - if I had money that I was trying to get rid of in order to get in a better state for financial aid, the first place I’d look is my family, the people that I trust. In a family without that trust, my advice was horribly bad - it either implies an illegal financial agreement or it suggests just tossing your money into the breeze and watching it fly away. Trust makes all the difference, and I assumed too much of it.

Second, I learned that when you give money to others, the worst-case scenario is usually assumed by others. If I give some money to my uncle or my cousin, it’s reasonable to think that others are assuming I’m doing it for personal gain over the long haul, that I must be expecting to be paid back in some fashion. That’s not how I view the world, and viewing it that way takes a big stretch for me.

I’ve explained how I view trust, and how that view can skew things. How do you view trust? How deep does it go? How much value does it have for you? Have you ever been hurt by trusting too much? Have you ever been helped by relying on a trusting relationship?

One of the most controversial subjects that I often touch upon is that of daycare. Some people are adamantly opposed to even suggesting the topic, stating unequivocally that taking your child to a daycare is a detriment to them. Others speak very positively about it, looking at it as a way to balance a child’s experience, enable more family income, and allowing parents to be refreshed and focused on their children.

Is daycare really necessary in modern life? If both parents intend to work professionally outside the home, particularly when the child is under school age, daycare often becomes a necessity. But is the financial freedom gained by both spouses working balance out with the benefits and drawbacks of daycare? It’s a good question that’s bound to open up a big can of worms.

What Constitutes Appropriate Care for Children?
I think there are four things that really need to be addressed for care of a preschool-aged child:

Love, or a deeply caring provider A small child deserves someone taking care of them that loves them, or at the very least has a deep sense of caring about their happiness and well-being. A caring individual will give the child attention, console them well, and develop a bond that’s vital for emotional growth.

Basic personal needs A child needs food, diaper changes, a clean place to be, medical care, and so on - the nuts and bolts of sustaining health and life.

Socialization A child needs to interact with a diversity of people in order to learn to interact with others of all shapes, colors, and sizes. Establishing a comfort level, both with peers and with older and younger people, not only brings deep fulfillment to children but builds in them basic social skills and self-confidence, both of which are needed in the real world.

Education and experiences A child needs someone to learn things from, from the basic stuff of how to brush your teeth to a trip to the fire station to see how the fire truck works. The world is full of richness and vibrant life that a well-rounded child needs to be exposed to.

Obviously, the biggest asset a stay-at-home parent brings to the table is love. There is no stronger advocate for a child’s all-around well being than a concerned parent - no paid provider can really compare to that. Also, a stay at home parent can provide basic personal needs at a high level, likely equal to or better than a daycare can.

A daycare provides that basic care element quite well, and by their very nature provides a rich environment for peer-to-peer socialization. Good daycares go beyond that, providing fulfilling experiences for a child that, in some cases, can’t be matched at home. However, a baseline daycare does not provide for a child as well as a stay-at-home parent can.

Parental Needs
Statements like that are often enough to fully convince people to become stay at home parents, but they’re not the full story. The parents themselves have issues of their own to manage:

Money needs Many households simply can’t make it if both parents aren’t working. That’s the economic reality today. To state that a “poor” family shouldn’t have children - an argument I’ve heard before - is patently ridiculous, as a loving family that wants to have a child should have all the opportunity in the world to have one.

Emotional needs Being a parent is emotionally and personally demanding. Many people need a diversity of experiences in their lives in order to be able to survive. Many parents are able to devote a few hours a day of uninterrupted love and attention to their children, but after that period, they’re emotionally spent, and further time leads to conflict. This is human nature - no matter how much you love a person, no one has infinite patience.

Fulfillment needs For many people, working outside the home gives them a deep sense of personal fulfillment, one that when balanced with caring for a child makes them a very complete and fulfilled person. That complete and fulfilled person is a person who will be a stellar parent for a child.

Finding the Right Balance
Balancing all of this stuff isn’t easy. Parents everywhere have to make some difficult decisions, and different parents are going to come to different conclusions. Stay at home parenting is the right answer for some situations. For many others, daycare is the right situation.

Maximizing daycare My wife and I concluded that the best solution for us was to find the best possible daycare in our area, one with providers who were adequately compensated and genuinely cared about the children, provided substantial amounts of fulfilling activity for all age levels, and had a full open door policy for parents to visit as they wished. Quite frankly, our standards were very high - we visited eight daycares and said no to all of them. The only daycare we found that really matched the level of care and experience we wanted for our child was an expensive one - it was also challenging to get a slot, as they are pretty rigorous about maximizing the space for each child and keeping the ratio of adults to children at a very impressive rate.

This was worth it to us. Our children get a great deal of education, interaction, and fulfillment at daycare - they are exposed to a lot of different concepts, often using a level of creativity that impresses me. Meanwhile, my wife and I both have the time to not only earn a good wage, but also to get the kind of well-rounded personal fulfillment in all aspects of life that we need to be the best parents we can be.

Maximizing staying at home On the flip side is a parent that chooses to stay at home. There’s a different set of demands here. The commitment of spending a full day every day with the child, the need to seek out socialization opportunities and have learning and enrichment opportunities as well, and the need to find personal space as well (which, when lacking, degrades your parental abilities).

It takes a special person to be up to those challenges, and it should be a goal that you set for yourself not just over the long haul, but every single day. If you can commit to that, then being a stay at home parent is probably the best thing that could happen to your child - but it’s not a commitment that most people are psychologically able to make.

In A Nutshell…
Children need a lot of care. They need to have their basic needs met, and they deserve much more: love and caring relationships, socialization, and additional enrichment and experiences. The answer to providing those things isn’t so easy, and it depends a lot on your set of skills and talents as an adult.

You owe it to your child to figure out what the best balance of these areas are for your situation. Never let a sense of guilt or disdain imposed by others because of your choice cause you to second-guess what you’re doing. There is no formula for the right answer, but if you look at the options available to you, look at your child’s needs, and look at what you need to be the best parent you can be, an answer will emerge that’s right for you. Don’t just settle for the quick, easy, or cheap answer though - be patient, listen to your own heart, and find what’s right for your situation. Make the choice that will give your child the best chance to develop into the kind of young person that every parent can be proud of, a well-balanced child with all the tools he or she needs to chase their dreams and perhaps change the world.

My recent career change means that I now have the freedom to write from wherever I happen to be. Similarly, my wife can pretty easily find work in any sufficiently-sized town - her skill set and resume would make her an attractive candidate pretty much anywhere.

Given that we currently live in one of the most expensive parts of the state of Iowa, does it make sense for us to consider moving in the future? Here are the reasons we’ve come up with for moving in the near future, moving later on down the line, and never moving at all.

Reasons for Moving Soon

Children Right now, both of our children are young enough that a move to a different area wouldn’t be highly traumatic for them. When we moved into our current home, it took about two weeks for my son (who was about one and a half years old) to adjust to the new house, and now he doesn’t even remember our old apartment. There are very few social ties for them as well.

Family. Our move would be designed to take us closer to our parents, who are getting older. They also live quite far from their grandchildren and there’s not nearly the interaction there that any of us would like. Moving closer allows a lot of deeper bonds to grow.

We’re not entrenched, either Although we’ve lived in this school district for several years, we’re far from entrenched in the neighborhood on our street. We’ve become somewhat friendly with two of the families living near us, but we’ve not yet reached the point where we feel that we are a deep part of a community yet. More on that in a bit.

Reduced house payments We could buy an equivalent house to the one we’re living in pretty much anywhere else in the state of Iowa for about 40% less than what we paid for this one. Assuming we could re-sell this house for the price we paid for it (which is reasonable - the housing market is solid here), we could easily take that cash, pay off the full mortgage, and have enough left over for a very large down payment on the next house.

Reasons for Moving Eventually

Time to find the exact place we want. We’d like to move closer to our extended families, likely somewhere on the eastern side of Iowa. If we took our time, we could carefully investigate the whole region of the state and find the right place for us to move.

The opportunity to have the home we’ve always wanted. What we want isn’t extravagant - it’s basically our current house, except on two floors and with slightly larger bedrooms and a slightly larger master bath, in the country. We can likely build that for less than $200,000, and in several years, we’ll have the resources to make it so.

Increased financial resources. Waiting for a few years means we’ll have more financial resources with which to buy or build exactly what we want.

Our current home is in an obvious growth area. Holding onto it for the next several years will see a price increase. We live in an area where the population growth is tremendous - it’s the only “hot” area in the entire state and there’s little startup companies and all sorts of things going on. If we sit and wait, our home will do nothing but increase in value.

Reasons for Never Moving

We’re entrenched in the community. While we may not have settled on our current block yet, we are entrenched in our local community. I serve on one important civic council and have been strongly encouraged to run for another council position. I know literally hundreds of people in this area - some of them quite well. I have a burgeoning professional relationship with at least a few people.

We like the area and resources. The area we currently live in gives us pretty quick access to the greater Des Moines area for cultural events and at least seven grocery stores within fifteen minutes of driving. If we move to the area we’re thinking about, we’d be largely far away from such assets.

Our Conclusion

Taking into account all of these factors and how they overlap, we’ve decided to not move in the short term. Not only would moving right now be a very questionable financial decision, we don’t have a strong plan in place for where we would move and how we would transition my wife’s employment (luckily, being a “transient worker,” I can move much easier).

The one regret we have in this decision is family. All of us - my wife, my two children, and myself - would benefit from being closer to our extended families, both in terms of increased familial bonds, but also in terms of having some additional support for parenting. My mother is so anxious to build bonds with her grandchildren and also to babysit them that she’s traveling up here for a weekend in May and basically ordering us out of the house to spend a weekend together while she watches the children. That says something significant about the family bond.

Tentatively, we’re looking at moving in seven to twelve years, depending on our financial state. If things go very well with my writing, we could move earlier than that. The later we move, though, the less likely we will be to move because of the social changes that would be foisted on our children - I have no real desire to yank a twelve year old and a ten year old away from their friends for reasons that aren’t truly pressing.

When I was freshly out of college with my first high-paying job, I would constantly insist on paying for everything. Meals out with friends, lattes at the coffee shop, even sometimes shopping purchases - I felt this deep need to step in, bust out my plastic, and say, “I’ll take care of it!”

This burning desire to always save the day led me down a path to a lot of debt. Even as the credit card bills rolled in, I didn’t worry about it too much - I figured I was earning good money and would soon be earning more and thus I shouldn’t worry about the bills. I kept being the superhero until I was drowning in quicksand myself.

It took many years, but I finally realized that I don’t need to be the financial hero all of the time - or even much of the time at all. Being the credit card-bearing Superman, like in that video above, doesn’t lead to being a hero - it leads to overspending, a sense of guilt, and a false image presented to others that you must keep up.

Over the long run, doing this over and over again leads to unhappiness. You might feel great when you’re doing it, but later that credit card bill will come in and you’ll feel sick as you pick up that envelope and open it. It’s just like the thrill of buying something new - it’s exciting at first, but very painful when the bill itself comes in.

Even worse, you damage the relationship’s dynamic by buying everything. When you repeatedly engage in a certain behavior, people come to expect it from you. It comes to define you. When you regress from that behavior, then people’s expectations are hurt. Don’t let yourself be defined as “the person that buys everything,” even if you’re tempted to - eventually, something will have to give and it won’t be good for whatever friendship or other relationship you’re trying to maintain.

Here are some of the tactics and ideas I used to break out of this mindset and learn to keep my credit cards in my wallet when those opportunities arose.

Recognize that you don’t have to buy stuff to be seen as successful and valuable to others. Most of the people you associate with don’t value the fact that you can buy things - they value you and the unique characteristics, personality, and charm that you bring. Friendships and relationships aren’t about buying stuff (at least healthy ones aren’t), so don’t actively try to make it that way. They already like you for who you are, not for the stuff you buy.

Commit to not buying anything when you go out. Whenever you go out with a group of friends, don’t buy anything (other than a bare minimum of your own food or drink) when you go out. In other words, practice the opposite of your previous behavior where you would feel compelled to buy everything.

Engage in activities that have fewer buying opportunities. Instead of going shopping and out for dinner, why not go to a free concert or go play disc golf at the park? Your activities don’t have to revolve around spending, thus you don’t have to feel the strong urge to be a superhero.

Don’t worry about losing a “friend” who expects you to buy their way. If anyone stops spending time with you because you’re not buying, that means they weren’t your friend - instead, they were merely milking you for what they could get for free. Let it slide - don’t feel guilty about it. They weren’t really friends with you, just your bank account.

Talk about it to your inner circle. This was a big step for me - I talked about it to my wife, then to a few of my friends. They were unbelievably understanding and supportive, to the point that they would basically yank receipts away from me and such. Your friends and family will help you with things like this - just open up to them and trust them a little.

I still like taking my parents out to dinner, but it’s no longer because I need to fulfill some inner desire to be a hero, it’s because I love them and they make great dinner companions. The time spent together enjoying wonderful food - and the guilt-free pleasure of my parents as they’re eating the meal - remind me of why I do it. It’s not so I can be a hero, it’s so that we can all enjoy a wonderful evening together without guilt, either now or later.

Recently, I had coffee with an old friend of mine who was torn over the decision to have a child. His spouse wants a child, as do his parents, but he doesn’t feel ready to take that leap. I told him that I thought he should stick to his guns on the subject, and he looked at me with a mix of shock and relief. He was sure I was going to try to talk him into having a child, given the value I’ve found in being a parent, but I made it very clear to him that there are a lot of deep costs to being a parent and you need to be fully sure of your choice before stepping up to the plate.

The best decision I have ever made in my life (other than arguably the choice to marry my wife) was to have children. My toddler-aged son and my infant daughter are two of the true high points in my life, and I genuinely enjoy every minute that I get to spend with them. The high point of my average day right now is the moment when my son comes in the door and shouts loudly, “DAD!” and we then play a loud game of Marco Polo from wherever I am in the house until we meet up, usually in the living room or the kitchen.

Many parents who experience this joy often tell others how wonderful it all is and encourage them to have children of their own, and I understand why a person would make that recommendation. I deeply enjoy fatherhood, and it’s something that has added an incredible amount of value to my life - why wouldn’t I want that same value to be added to the lives of my friends?

Yet, in the end, I generally encourage people not to become parents. The joys of parenting come with a great number of costs, and these costs really add up. If you’re not ready to commit to those costs fully, then you should wait on parenthood.

The financial costs of children are well documented. You should expect to spend a quarter of a million dollars, all told, on your child by the time they walk out the door. That’s a lot of cash. But it’s not the only cost, and it is the other costs that really add up over the years:

Time Let’s say, on average, you spend three hours a day on child care over the eighteen years of their childhood. That’s almost 20,000 hours, or 821 days around the clock, or two and a quarter years of around-the-clock time devoted to child care.

Freedom Especially in the early years of a child’s life, the ability to just pick up and do something on the spur of the moment is gone. You can still go out sometimes, but it comes at the cost of finding a babysitter you trust and also working with that sitter’s schedule.

Experiences With three hours out of an average day suddenly gone, you find yourself with a lot less time to enjoy other pursuits. Your schedule becomes hard to synchronize with others as well, leaving you with much more limited opportunities for hobbies and other activities.

Career advancement Career advancement is still possible, but climbing the ranks after the birth of a child often means spending less time with the child and not forming as deep of a bond. You end up feeling pulled in a lot of directions, and it feels quite stressful.

Marital stress To a point, you lose some of the time you used to have to bond with your spouse. You’re also injecting the dynamic of a new person into the core of your life. Flavors of loneliness, inadequacy, confusion, and jealously will float through the marriage when a child comes along - and you have to be strong enough to make things work through these changes.

That doesn’t mean that I think becoming a parent is a bad move. It’s not. The real message here is don’t let anyone use peer pressure or social pressures to convince you to become a parent. If all of your friends are having children, that’s not a reason to become a parent. If your parents are hinting for grandchildren, that’s not a reason to become a parent. If your spouse is getting anxious, that’s not a reason to become a parent.

The one reason, the real reason, to become a parent is because you truly want to. You’ll know it if you do - if you read that list of costs above and yet still keep thinking about a child, you should probably have one, for instance. If you find yourself thinking a lot about adding a child to your life and the thoughts are positive, you’re probably ready.

If you’re not genuinely committed, though, children are not worth the costs. They demand - and deserve - your full love, attention, and care, and that comes with a very high cost, one that many people out there, unfortunately, are not equipped to pay. The investment only comes with a fair return (a well-rounded young person that you helped to raise) if you truly feel the calling to become a parent.

In short, if someone is trying to convince you to become a parent and you don’t feel it, don’t make that leap. The cost to you - and to that unborn child - is very high, and it’s not fair to either one of you to expect you to pay it when you’re not ready.

Now that life has settled down with two children in our home, my wife and I are starting to look at the decision to have a third child. Our plan always has been to have our children close together in age so that they can be peers to each other (roughly) during their school years, but we never quite hammered out how many we wanted to have, figuring we could cross that bridge when we got there, much as we did with the decision to have our second child.

We’ve arrived at that bridge.

Having enough love to spread around to more children isn’t really a problem. Our evenings (especially before 8 PM) and most of our weekends are completely centered around our children at this point, and the more, the merrier. Adding another child wouldn’t change our day to day lifestyle much at all.

Our biggest concern is the financial aspect. Adding another child would change our financial situation significantly, much more than the leap from one child to two children did. Here’s why.

Child care costs would come very close to matching my wife’s salary. Adding a third child to our daycare bill in one year would bring the weekly total to around $400. This adds up to an annual bill in the range of $21,000, which begins to approach my wife’s after-tax salary.

Our solution to this would be for one of us to become a stay at home parent. I think this is the inevitable solution if we choose to have a third child - one of us would have to drop out of the normal workday lifestyle for about five years to raise our children until they are old enough to all be in school.

We’re also looking at adoption. We are beginning to seriously look at adoption. There are many, many children out there who were dealt a poor nurturing hand right off the bat.

On the other hand, this raises a big question about financial support for these children. Can we afford to feed five mouths, provide them with ample educational and growth opportunities, keep our house, and maintain some modicum of a good life with just one salary? That’s a big question - in fact, it’s the biggest question, really.

Right now, it’s that final question - and the uncomfortable answers to it - that keep us from wanting a third child. We’re not concerned with showing the child love and care, but we are concerned that our two children now might lose opportunities due to taking on the additional commitments. In the end, our desire to have more children is outweighed by concern for our ability to provide opportunities for the children we have now.

I also think it’s sad when genuinely loving parents who want to have another child at home have to consider not doing so because of financial concerns like this. However, every solution to this problem that I can conceive of ends up encouraging people to have more children, particularly people who can’t properly care for them, and that’s overall a detriment to society.