Shoralis The cost of deciding to have a child: from birth to university, in numbers
The cost is not a line item but a curve
The cost of a child is not a single amount but a curve that changes shape with age: it starts in the first year with baby gear and diapers/formula, jumps at daycare age, widens in the school years with education, furniture and tutoring, and peaks at university with housing and fees. A single average figure hides this curve.
The right question is not "how much does a child cost?" but "which years will press our budget hardest?" The daycare year and the university year are the two peaks of most households; between them spending returns to normal and savings rebuild.
There is far more than direct spending
In most households the biggest item is the invisible one: lost income. One parent leaving the job or moving to part-time can exceed the sum of direct spending for years. The effect of the career break on retirement savings enters almost no calculation.
Housing is a silent item too: a child makes one extra room mandatory; the rise in rent or in the installment is the child's indirect cost. In big cities this alone can be the largest component of the curve.
It collides with your goals — see it in advance
The child decision does not arrive on a blank page: you have a home down payment, a car, retirement goals, and the new expense curve delays all of them. The size of the delay depends on your current savings rate as much as on the size of the expense.
That is why "child cost" and "goals" must sit together at the decision table: with both the child's annual expenses and your existing goals marked on the same line, it becomes possible to see which goal slips by how many months.
Open two lives in the simulation
In Shoralis, leave one branch as it is; add the 'Child' decision to the second branch: enter the annual expense curve, the income change (if any) and the housing growth. The line shows the net-wealth difference between the two lives month by month.
Look again under the pessimistic scenario: in the income-shrink + high-inflation combination, which goal slips by how many months? Seeing the number does not make the decision easy but prevents blindness — and matures the answer you will give to "when?"
Test this decision in the simulator
Run two lives side by side: with and without the decision. See the net-wealth gap in a projection of up to 30 years.
Open the simulator