My Family’s Money

At 00:24 on November 20, 2008 my son was born.  My family of two has now officially become a family of three. ¹  I am very, very excited about getting to know my little boy and hope that our journey together until one of us dies is an exciting one in which love flows freely, knowledge is sought and dispensed, and all three of us become better people.

Earlier on in our pregnancy I had some serious questions concerning the cost of having kids and set out on a journey to record all the money that we spent up until the birth of our son.  I haven’t gotten the final tally together for how much it cost me and my wife to birth our son, but the preliminary numbers are looking very good.

Helped along by some very generous friends and family who either gave us their no longer needed children’s clothing or who bought us things that we needed outright, we incurred very little out of pocket expenses except for some medical bills.  I am estimating that we spent somewhere around $2000 to have our baby.

I plan on continuing this experiment, but I’m not too sure how to proceed given that detecting small changes in our spending habits will be difficult to track.  I don’t want to be spending my time calculating how much gas we burned traveling to a doctor’s appointment or some similarly trivial expenditure.  I’d rather be spending that time with my family.

1. As far as we were concerned we were a family of three the moment our child was conceived, but the law and medical professions tend to disagree with us.  Either way, everybody now agrees that he is a part of our family. [↩]