Here’s How Much Our Daughter’s 5th Year Cost Us

This is our fifth year outlining details of kid-related items and costs we’ve encountered with our oldest kiddo.  If you missed the earlier posts + our post on tips for new baby items, you can check them out here:

• Our Baby Item Tips For New Parents
• Here’s How Much Baby’s First Year Cost
• Here’s How Much Baby’s Second Year Cost
• Here’s How Much Our Child’s Third Year Cost
• Here’s How Much Our Daughter’s 4th Year Cost

Now that our family has expanded, we have started to also track our annual expenses for our son, which can be found here:

Here’s How Much Our Son’s First Year Cost

We’re now going to dig into the costs during our kiddos fifth year. My oh my, where does time go?!

Some caveats:

• We live in Canada where healthcare costs for doctor and ER visits are free.  Vision is also free for kids under 18. Thankfully she is healthy and the only medical related costs we have for her are dental visits.
• For items that we had for our oldest but held on to until our youngest was finished before selling, we will include in oldest’s post after the item has been sold (so those with a single child can see the costs with just one child involved).
• Certain items we split between the two of them, such as annual memberships, since it’s something the whole family partakes in

The Breakdown:

• Medicines/Hygiene: $204
  • We snuck in our last dental cleaning last August while we were still covered with our supplemental health plan from my former employer.  Without coverage, this cleaning would have been $180 but with 70% covered it was $54 out of pocket.
  • We were smacked with various colds throughout the year and paid for over the counter medicines like kids Advil and Tylenol as well as a few prescriptions too.
  • We also saw an allergist and purchased some allergy meds. The appointment with the allergist specialist cost $40.
  • Lastly, we got a hearing test done (it’s confirmed, she just has selective listening when asking to clean up the house…) This was free, we just had to pay for parking at the facility.
• Random Things: $260
  • Pretty much any figurine, play set, game, book, puppet, etc that we purchased for the year was from our local second hand shop.  They have an amazing selection of kids items for super reasonable prices.  We’ve found more value here than buying things second hand on FB marketplace or Varage Sale.
  • Ordered new passport photos and a new 5 year passport
  • 3 new water bottles
  • Potty seats
  • Lego set
  • Magic School Bus books
  • A shelving cube for her room
  • A Save/Spend/Give/Invest piggy bank – woohoo!
• Christmas Items: $10
  • • Santa delivered two free items – a Polly Pocket set we got from our local Buy Nothing Group and a Science Experiment Kit that one of our FIRE friends gave to us (thanks Chelsey!)
    • We gifted her a set of Disney Fairies figurines and Polly Pocket clothes and accessories.  We purchased a mixed fairies lot for $8, kept the 5 figurines, and sold the rest of the lot back for $8.  Ba boom. Another FIRE friend gave us a set of Polly Pocket clothes & accessories (thanks Chantal and Shane!).
    • Crafts and stocking stuffers: $10
• 5th Birthday Items: $36 
  • • Pet fish ($0, second hand adoption)
    • Frozen castle ($0, second hand)
    • Unicorn stuffy from her brother ($2, second hand)
    • The Fairy Game ($5, second hand)
      • Great purchase (83% off retail price) and we all really love this cooperative learning game
    • Frozen Lego ($7, new)
    • 5th Birthday Party Supplies ($22)
      • Had a low key park party – snacks for adults and kiddos, auntie made cupcakes, piñata, pin the horn on the unicorn, and goodie bags
• Clothes: -$159
  • We continue to sell more clothes than we bring in
• Activities: $702
  • Spending at the cabin: $17
    • Swimming pool, ice cream, and the petting farm
  • Swimming Lessons: $94
    • Two weeks of swimming lessons over the summer while at the cabin
  • 1/2 Annual Zoo Membership: $112
    • This is 1/2 of the cost to have the family membership for the year.  We put the other half under Parker’s expenses.
  • The Big Box: $11
    • Large indoor entertainment centre
  • Bowling: $15
    • Kids bowl free from May 15-September 15. We went 4 times with some friends and just had to pay for shoe rentals each time.
  • Gymnastics: $30
    • $5 drop in per class, we went randomly in November, December, January, and April
  • Sports Centre: $166
    • This is 1/2 of the cost to have the family membership from mid October – January.  We put the other half under Parker’s expenses.
  • Skiing: $0
    • Combo of late snow + knowing that we were heading to Portugal in the middle of the winter + Parker napping in the middle of the day, we didn’t make it out to the ski hill this year.  We did take Finn out to our sled hill in town with her skis to head down that hill a good 10 times in December/January. It was actually really nice to get her on skis only 5 minutes away from home.  Definitely hurt the back not having a magic carpet to bring her back up to the top!
  • Portugal costs: $48
    • Airplane activities: $6
    • Carnival: $8
    • Lisbon Oceanarium aquarium: $22
    • Portugal souvenir: $12
    • Note – Of course, there were travel related costs to going to Portugal with kids (plane tickets, staying in a 2 bedroom rental vs a 1 bedroom), but we don’t consider these kid specific costs and rather fall into our overall travel bucket.
  • Fall Soccer Registration: $129
    • We signed Finn up for 8 outdoor soccer classes for this upcoming fall
  • Preschool: $80
    • The Alberta government rolled out its various subsidies for affordable child care which makes Finns preschool free (2 days a week, 3 hours sessions).
    • We paid $80 at the beginning of the year to go towards various supplies they use during the school year.
• Things we received for free as gifts or for free from random other parents in our community on FB Marketplace / Varage Sale: $0
  • Gifts from friends & family:
    • Holidays: Frozen magnet book, Picasso tiles (we love these!), a Poop A Lot animal thing, a remote control car, another Polly Pocket set.
    • 5th birthday: MAKE UPPPP (huge hit oh my), clip-on earrings, a necklace, a succulent, stuffies, a fairy garden, Polly Pocket (wait what?!), Lego sets, books, crafts, and a dress.
  • Free items (mainly from random other parents via the Varage Sale app):
    • I honestly stopped tracking this but we’ve been reaching out for fewer items these days.
• Items we sold: -$347
  • The purgeeeeee continues!  I love getting rid of stuff!

How Much Did We Spend?

Drum roll pleaseeeeeee…..

We spent a grand total of $706 during our little lady’s fifth year.  That comes out to $59 per month.

Wait – I swear, kids are supposed to be expensive dammit!

We should not gloss over that we “made” money this year selling items.  In total, we sold $506 of kid related items for the year.  Without this included, we spent $1,212 – which still is lower than I was expecting.  I don’t see why we wouldn’t include these sales though as these items were things we had picked up for kiddo and now no longer use/need.

We also contributed $2,500 towards her RESP education fund to get the full 20% match ($500) from the government so a total of $3,000 was invested into her future education this year.

I’d say her eating has plateaued the past 2 years and we have a general routine of meals/snacks that she prefers.  We are likely spending $75/month on food-related costs for her.  Here’s her typical day:

• breakfast – toast or wraps or pancakes with Nutella
• gummy vitamin “treat”
• pre-lunch snack – frozen yogurt tube, cucumbers, almonds, bar
• 1 treat a day, which we try to do around lunch
• lunch – typically some sort of carb related meal with fruit
• afternoon snack – garlic peas, seaweed, olives, pickles, apple sauce, rice cake with cream cheese
  • Yes, most days it is all of these things
• supper – whatever we’re eating, although she’s gotten more picky this year so we might have to tweak it a bit for her – mainly that she doesn’t seem to want anything spicy anymore
• stories & snack – apple, fancy old cheddar cheese, frozen mango, red peppers, mini muffin, and likely another frozen yogurt tube

So if we also include the $2,500 RESP contribution and ~$75/month of food ((75*12)=$900) we’re looking at a total of $4,106 out of our pockets in her fifth year.  Of course, the RESP is elective and we recognize our privilege of being able to contribute this $2,500 towards her education each year.

There you have it!  Short and sweet as we really didn’t spend that much 

It really is shocking to me how we have yet to spend over $2,000 in any given year so far (excluding RESP and food).  And truly we are not sitting around doing nothing!

Here are some of our typical low/no cost activities that we do:

• playgrounds/parks
• ride bikes
• play in the backyard (sand box, swing, play house, teeter totter, scooter, water table)
• chill in the hot tub
• read books (lotsssss of books daily – free from the library – we currently have over 100 library books checks out)
• play with friends
• play with figurines in her pretend world (her fav)
• swimming (sports centre in the winters and creeks, lakes, outdoor pools in the summer)
• splash park
• walk through the dog park
• hiking
• skate park
• pump park
• go for a date to get a Timbit
• play a board game, cards, play doh, lego, crafts, etc
• sledding
• skating at an outdoor rink
• snowshoeing
• watch hockey games at a local rink
• zoo
• science centre
• holiday parades, celebrations, light shows, fireworks
• weekly free classes: parented toddler preschool class, music & rhyme, lego day, Kindergarten ABC class, mindfulness/yoga/art classes, story time, rumble & roar class
  • It’s a bit of a Catch-22 that those of us who are not working Monday-Friday can access many free activities going on during the week

Stay tuned as we will provide a similar update in the near future for Parker’s annual spend report for his second year. Any guesses on what we spent on his second year??

Those with parents, are you as crazy as us and keep track of all of your kid-related expenses?  Would you say you spent more or less than $706 on kiddo-related expenses (not including future education and food) during their fifth year?  What was your largest child-related purchase(s) this year?  How have your child-related costs changed compared to their first few years?

Those without kids yet, if you’re reading this blog you likely are not part of the herd mentality and hopefully you too can stay well under the average of $8,000-$13,000/year.  The Wall Street Journal upped the cost to raise a child from birth – 18… they are now tallying it up to $300,000!  That is NUTS!! There is no right or wrong way to parent.  We are simply showing that the “norm” $8,000-$13,000 (or more) annually in the first few years can be challenged. We completely recognize our privilege to not have costly childcare costs in the picture.

Any questions for us?  Hope this helps!

And again, if you’d like to check out the related posts on this topic, you can check them out here:

• Our Baby Item Tips For New Parents
• Here’s How Much Baby’s First Year Cost
• Here’s How Much Baby’s Second Year Cost
• Here’s How Much Our Child’s Third Year Cost
• Here’s How Much Our Daughter’s Fourth Year Cost

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