My Husband Says We Can’t Afford a Kid. We Make $200,000 a Year.
I would like to have a baby. My husband is an anxious person who claims he’s “just a realist” who tends to be stubborn and likes big things planned out in advance.
He agreed to have a kid before we got married, but only if we could financially afford to. That’s where our opinions differ; I think we can, and he disagrees.
Together, we currently make at least $200,000 in gross income. However, we live in a city that we love with high costs and we are religious enough that my husband INSISTS that the kid needs to go to religious day school.
(There is no flexibility around this requirement. Believe me, I’ve tried.) Religious day schools in our region are notoriously expensive (we’re talking five-digit numbers yearly, starting at $20,000).
My husband fears that even with tuition assistance, which is common, we would end up leading a lifestyle that requires us to penny pinch,
worry about money, never go on vacation, have no retirement fund (to the point of joking about committing suicide as a retirement plan), and devote every single spare dollar to tuition.
Even if I say that we could afford it now, he argues that with inflation and recessions, etc.,
one day we may not be able to afford it. Clearly, in an ideal world, he would want a trust fund with the tuition money already saved up. Obviously, that’s not going to happen.