If You Wait, You Will Never

Hey folks,

Going back a while here. I remember almost as soon as I hit about 21 years old, I was asked the same question. On and off, from different people, the question came. My answer to every one of them was the same. I’m not ready yet. The answer I got was ALWAYS the same.

“If you wait until you are ready, until you can afford it, you will never do it.”

A friend of mine sent me this article that was talking about the cost of raising a child. Now some 15 years later, with a Son, I found that this advice was correct. If I had read this article before hand, I may have taken a different path. Pretty scary if you think about it. The article breaks down all the expected and unexpected costs of raising the child. I started looking into this a little further and found Baby Center. They have the Cost of Raising a Child Calculator. I’ll admit I found this pretty cool.

It allows you to break down single or two parent homes, location of where you live, etc. The results are pretty frightening. For the person that sent the article to me, the results were estimated at $395,812.

Let’s work with this number for a second. This is actually a LOW number. Let’s take real life and add in some stuff shall we?

According to the Calculator, miscellaneous is $968.00 annual. I guess that would be Birthday and Christmas presents. How much did you ACTUALLY spend? Then take my situation. $2000.00 for a helmet, doctors visits etc. This is in addition. Then you have to add in other stuff that comes up, like with my friend who has a Daughter in Cheerleading. My friend sent me the breakdown of cost for just this summer. Total, $707.00 not expected.

I have friends with children with other medical conditions that are even more costly. Then comes the whole school and life experiences. As most of you may know, I just attended my Nieces 8th grad graduation. This is a middle school graduation folks. The BIG one is four years away. But this was a big deal for her. So? Dress, shoes, accessories. But then I went there. I counted 5 stretched limos. FIVE. These are 14 year olds we are talking about. Thankfully my Niece did not want one.

I feel wonderful about my upcoming experience in watching Joshua grow. I have all these things to look forward to. I’m not complaining, but I NOW understand. To all the people out there that are waiting until you are ready, financially, mentally, and emotionally, I repeat these words that were so often told to me..

“If you wait until you are ready, until you can afford it, you will never do it.”
Peter