I picked up on one word, “crib.” Don’t worry so much, that is not the investment phase of life. “Getting by” is just fine when you are at the “crib” phase of life, you should just enjoy it.
Ray has a point, don’t get caught up in the hype that you need their entire educational expenses paid in full the day they finish high school.
Even without student loans, college savings pick up steam near the finish line, and there’s nothing that says you can’t pay some of it while they are in school. When they are little, you work less, you tend to earn less and you spend more time with them. Once the kiddos are young adults, you are in the prime of your earning years, you can work more because they can and will want to do more by themselves and I personally believe college costs are overestimated. It’s nice to put a dent in it, but ignore the pressure to have it all saved up before it starts.
Here’s my anectdote, it’s not one person it’s about 7 or 8. I’ve got a gaggle of relatives with kids in various UC and CS schools. They go to some seminar that the school puts on or check the website and freak out. Since I’m the math cousin, I get either the phone call or the story at thanksgiving that UC and CS schools cost 30 or 40k a year because that’s what the school said. Then I look at the numbers on the school website because I’m not that old and I seemed to have gotten by on peanuts. So I look at the website’s cost estimate and they list health insurance, car insurance, gas, food, and all this other stuff into their formula. But unless you are plucking some kid out of a hut in some foreign country, you are already paying for that stuff and doing fine. Just figure the actual rent and tuition. High schoolers already cost you insurance, car, gas, car insurance, cell phones, sports, proms, pictures, food, cable t.v., electricity, you need to back out the cost of the things you are paying for now. You don’t just start feeding them the day they go to college.
(can I have a side rant here, the cost of having teenagers is ridiculous, the new higher tuition rates at California state universities is $5800 a year, the cost of having a kid that is a high school cheerleader is $2400, With club sports, high school sports and all the other crap, I can’t wait for college to start so I can save money).
They can live in crampt, disgusting conditions, survive on macaroni and cheese, drink lucky lager, get a crappy job, shop at thrift stores and realize how good they had it when they lived at home. Don’t rob them of life’s greatest lesson, poverty! I did it and i would do it again tomorrow, I had a couple silver spoons in my mouth until the day I landed on campus and I learned more because my parents didn’t have a pile of money set aside for me. I kinda think that was by design. Come to think of it I was pitiful, I had never done a load of laundry or operated a vaccuum, I had never cooked a thing, I’m not sure i even picked my laundry up until day 1 of college. They paid my tuition, gave me x number of dollars for the rest and wished me well. About 30 days into it, i was broke, called home and was told that i needed to figure it out myself. Nothing I learned in the classroom compared to what that taught me. I budgeted, I found ways to do things cheaper and I started visiting my grandmas on weekends and called them often, why? Not because mom told me to, but because I learned real quick that they have food, in exchange for hugs, kisses and a few hours of conversation, you can fill your belly and usually you left with a bag of groceries. What started out as a selfish act to cure starvation, ended up with hundreds of lessons from my elders that otherwise i would have never listened to. Depression era stories had no meaning until then.
So just play with your babies, if they have to fend for themselves a little when they go to college, trust me, they will thank you twenty years later.
