My 62 year old daughter cost me exactly $600. That included my wife's doctor for both pre & post delivery services and all hospital charges at O'Connor Hospital in San Jose, Ca. I remember how proud I was to be able to Prepay the $600 particularly when I was only making $400 per month.
There were.....complications when my son was born. Simply put, the exact cost of those complications took me 10 months to completely pay off whilst working on an off shore oil rig as the head of food and living services.
I sued for custody of my son, who wasn't related to me, so there were the attorney fees. Then, before being able to adopt, I had to go through a foster parent program, which cost a considerable amount of time, but there wouldn't have been a charge for it, except that they weren't too amenable to a single male foster parent so I used the same attorney for that. I don't remember what the total cost was but when I received the bill, my attorney had marked most of it as "no charge." Still, the amount was in the thousands. It's a lot cheaper to have your own than to sue for custody of the neighbor's kid. I was in my early twenties and he was seven or eight. When he was thirteen, I was twice his age. I have no children, by blood, at least not that I am aware of. I've always hated the term, natural child, because it's not like he was unnatural.
Mhm, Lon, your thread makes me smile because the mere wording of "the cost of a child" would at least be frowned upon by many over here. Calculating these is a clear no-no. Kids are seen as a godsend and not a cost factor. Such a view is possible, though, because parents don't have to pay anything related to pregnancy and birth. It's an insurance cover. So I paid nothing under the old regime and wouldn't have to pay anything now. However, man would not be human if there weren't some number crunchers who have reckoned that raising a child would cost you about $130,000 up to the age of 18. Well, I have two daughters, so double that...;-) And both of them took up studies aged 18. I was lucky that one daughter qualified for a scholarship but I supported the other one financially for seven years. Well, what's money anyway?
Hah. The cost of having a child is much different from the cost of raising a child. I couldn't venture a guess about the cost of raising five.
When I think back on raising 5 kids, I remember that we went through a gallon of milk a day. So the amount we spent on milk alone was staggering over the years.
We had 4 boys and then the girl(interesting story behind that).Back in the 70s and early 80s w'd spend over $200/week