re: The cost of daycare is ridiculous these days

No shite! I paid at most $140 a week before my son was potty trained. Now it's $55 a week because he's in Pre-K. What kind of Ivy League daycares are these people sending their kids to?

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quote:pay $25 a day to have my daughter watched during the day. good God I would love to have this option

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We paid $100/week for ours 5 yrs ago. I know location/ region matters but there is a huge spread in prices on daycare.

Didn't the state cut tops?

$25/day sounds great. Mine is $255/week per kid. Nannies are more.

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You gotta be rich or poor to have kids these days. Middle class just can't afford them.

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Bingo. Idk how regular people could afford 2 kids in daycare at one time. At one point I thought it was be great to have twins, but now I realize I'd probably have to give one up for adoption

Pregnant now and looking for daycare in Dallas or the suburbs. Literally every place I call is $1250-1300 a month for 1 child. How do people afford to have more than 1 kid???

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I had no clue until my son was born

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Congrats on the secks.

As someone preparing to send their first child to college in August, I wish it was like paying for daycare.

shite, I was floored at how fricking much it costs to go in-state to a small university.

He was down to South Alabama ($22,000/year) and Troy ($16,000/year). College costs are way more than just tuition and fees.

And there's no paying by the moth either - they want that money all up front before each semester.

He's a good, smart kid but he isn't scholarship smart. We make too much on paper to get any kind of financial aid.

We are upper middle class with good jobs (banker and pharma rep) but we don't just have an extra $10,000 laying around to write those checks twice a year.

To all of y'all with babies and toddlers - whatever you think you need to save for college? Triple it. shite is so expensive and increases every single year. It's mindblowing.

And at least this kid wanted to go to a small instate school. My youngest? Has her heart set on Brown or Stanford. We're so fricked.

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If you can't afford the costs of children then don't have them in the first place. Don't make the taxpayer foot the bill for your incompetence.

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There's a dependent care FSA to allow parents to set aside money pre-tax to pay for childcare at licensed facilities. Sounds great? It is, until you realize it maxes out at $5k annually, which isn't enough to cover a year of daycare. Have a second kid? The FSA still maxes out at $5k. Third kid? Max still applies. Incremental increases to the FSA alone would go along way toward helping middle class people more easily afford childcare.

Send them to school with our kids.