The Price of Parenthood

AllThingsFinancial is running an interview with WSJ financial columnist Jonathan Clements (thanks to Ramit Sethi for the link).

It’s a pretty good read that emphasizes the right things (“Financial success has very little to do with your ability to pick winning investments.”), but what stuck out for me was the last paragraph:

I have two children, and I am not swapping them for all the money in the world.
Still, you have to be realistic: If you have kids, it’s much harder to retire. I
regularly receive emails from people who boast that they retired in their 40s.
What do these folks have in common? No, they aren’t brilliant investors and, no,
they didn’t luck out by signing on with some successful start-up company.
Instead, the defining characteristic of these folks is that they never had
children.

Do you remember the old Fox show, Married With Children? Reading those lines made me think of the clink of the jail cell slamming shut in the show’s theme music.

I can speak from experience: Jonathan is absolutely correct. My guess is that my kids cost me on the order of $60,000 a year!