Haha yes kid costs are the big unknown for sure! We’re estimating $2,400/kid/year for activities. It will be much lower than this in the younger years and likely higher than this in the later years. Our thought is that if our child decides to do something much more expensive (say figure skating like your daughter) we can easily pick up a side gig to support those activities. Like you, we want to be able to expose our kid(s) to activities they are passionate about. And then of course, once she’s a bit older, we plan to have her working a part time job in high school if she wants more spending.

Thanks Anna for this great comment!

I suppose a “what do we eat” post shall be in the works haha.

Yes good point re the move. These are our current costs. Not our projected annual spend once we FIRE (hopeful baby 2, more travel, supplemental ins, etc). We’ve written a post on that back in the day and plan to reassess come the new year once we have a better figure on changes to home costs with our upcoming move (taxes will be a bit more, no change to ins, utilities will likely be the same, no HOA, but now on our own for maintenance/roof).

Travel hacking is an art and you MUST be organized to make it work. We’ve been doing it since 2010 and between the two of us we tag team sign ups. Typically we will open 3-6 new cards a year. A veryyyy small amount of points came from work travel. 99% is travel hacking through credit card sign ups. We will be putting together a Travel Hacking 101 Series soon!

Exactly. Once you’ve reached FI where your net worth will more than allow your beneficiaries to live a good life, no need for life insurance.

Thanks Chris and no surprise that we’re aligned with our spending ha.

Entertainment, gym, holidays, + mental therapy = MONEY WELL SPENT 🙂

This is why I cancelled all my life insurance. Both of our kids are adults now and we don’t need to provide for them. We have no debt other than mortgage and have enough equity to pay it off when sold plus leave the kids a huge inheritance. So why keep dumping money each month into life insurance, put that money into your retirement accounts instead.

Great round-up on the expenses

On kids eating, i am still in disbelief sometimes 😂just this morning my youngest (5y) ate 3 eggs and a bagel, i am like where do you even put that, you are not even 40 lbs!! On sports and activities, really depends on what they enjoy doing, but for now i budget 3 to 4k / year for my 10 years old doing gym. This covers 9hrs training per week from september to june + some optional-but-recommended-by-the-club summer trainings, competion fees, club’s competiton clothing, etc. And this is only regional level, from what i heard, girls who compete in higher levels it can come up to over 10k easily, because they train more hours and competitions are most of the time quite far from home. My son being only 5, he is still trying different things, he just started karate, and 2 classes per week comes about 125/ month, we will see how he likes it. Now with covid, not sure how school sports offering will be handled, we typically have acces to low cost sport classes that kids can do at school once a week during lunch time like basket-ball or athletism, but havent heard anything yet since classes started, guess will see…those are sponsored by government i believe so more kids can have access, and it use to be like 60$ for about 12 weeks 1x/week…pretty good deal 😊

Thanks Mary! Travel hacking has been very good to us over the years. It’s crazy how much kids eat eh!? I’m always curious on kid related costs – how much would you estimate you spend per year for the various activities, trainings, and competitions per kid? And how old are they? That’s our general thought too – have a baseline estimate of our annual spend and if we end up spending more on kids (which like you were totally fine with as we want to let them explore their interests), then we get a part time gig to help with those added expenses during those younger years.