MemberDon’t hate me. 🙂 We are in the midwest, small town, and only pay about $100/week for an in-home daycare. She charges only $2/hour which is cheap even for the area and we love her. So for 2, its about $900 a month.
MemberBoston-area here. Our daycare is $1850 a month in the ‘burbs (mortgage is just under $2800). We live in a good town within a 25 minute drive of my work in Boston proper when there’s no traffic, but commuting takes 45 minutes to an hour each way during rush hour, when I actually commute in, so that means keeping our son in daycare roughly 10 hours/day. The daycares near my work are close to $3-5k a month. It’s all pretty outrageous, but luckily it’s most expensive for the first 3 years of a kiddo’s life, then preschool is cheaper, and then finally our son will start public school (woohoo). If you can swing going slightly outside the city, it’ll be cheaper and the wait lists will be shorter due to less demand.
We really want to TTC number#2 this fall, but it’ll mean some serious sacrifices for a few years :/
MemberWe live in the Bay Area (Oakland) and just started our daughter off at a fantastic preschool. It’s 1085/month which ends up being about 3% of our monthly income. Definitely a steal for the area. Her previous daycare was double that, highly rated on paper, but they had the rather unfortunate habit of physically abusing kids- something they hid quite well. More expensive is not always better, far from it.
We’re expecting our second in Feb, and we’ll probably get a nanny for the baby. This won’t be cheap (2500 at a minimum!), but it will be convenient! This will mean that with two kids, childcare will end up being almost 10% of our income. All things considered, I guess it’s not too bad since we’ll be doing public school for elementary. Come middle school though, and we’ll have to do private, to the tune of 75k to 80k annually for two kids. *shudder*
MemberI know your asked for 5 days a week/ 40 hours but wanted to chime in since I am in your area. We are just north of Boston, we spend $852/month for our 2.5 year old, she only goes 3 days a week though. It is an in-home daycare, nothing fancy but she was recommended to me, doesn’t charge when we are late, and she’s on our street. I looked into Boston centers since that’s where my husband and I work and the prices were outrageous.
My husband was very hesitant to try for baby #2 because of daycare costs, it will be tight if it happens soon and they’re both in daycare. Our savings has taken a hit (mostly because I changed jobs) so that doesn’t help.
My only advice is moving out of the city. Not sure it’s possible to have kids there unless you are a billionaire.
MemberI’m in Texas and pay $205 per week for my 1.5-year-old. I’m pregnant now and if all goes well I’ll need to get on the waiting list soon. Their infant rate is negligibly higher, like $215.
This is a bit lower than average I believe, as when I toured daycares I got quoted anywhere between $220 – $350 per week. The higher end is more for the fancy schmancy multilingual Montessori types though. I love my son’s daycare because he loves the teachers there, goes from my arms to theirs perfectly happy. You can’t fake that with the little ones.
Edit to add answer to your question about %of our PRE-tax income. My husband is self-employed so it varies and mine too depending on my bonus, but if we look at it from year to year I’d say about 0.5%.
HostessSo we literally moved here 2 months ago. Moving right now isn’t an option unless we want to pay $10k to break our lease. Moving out of the city isn’t really an option either, because the nature of my work I need to come and go sporadically sometimes and have to rely on public transit because a parking permit is $400/month. I suppose if we started TTC now, then we could move when our lease is up, but that would potentially put me right at or after my due date which seems pretty risky.
The daycare prices I cited were for the closest one to my work that would allow me to pop over and feed on my breaks. I do have one of the FSA pretax options for an account. The nanny-share stuff is a good idea. I thought about maybe seeing if D.H. could go back to working an opposite schedule so we’re both not doing 9-5. I think that would probably be our best option.
Thanks for the responses. Lots to think about… looks like no TTC for at least another year, maybe more… thinking about having my AMH tested to see whether or not I should panic.
MemberDamn. That’s crazy. I live in the Rocky Mountain region, USA. Ours is $825 a month for full-time, and you get 10% off if you set up automatic payments. I’m going back to work part-time, so it’ll be about $400 a month.
Our mortgage is about $1200 a month for a 1800 sq ft home.
Wages are definitely less here, and our health insurance is crazy expensive due to 1) very small population state, 2) small employer group plan, 3) employers contribute very little >:( I need a new job!
MemberI said two percent of my income but that was only for $1k. We pay almost $13k a year so it’s 20% of my yearly income.
It was going to bother me if I didn’t correct my post!
MemberWe live south of boston and full time around here runs roughly 1600/month. When researching the costs we were shocked and made some changes to our plans – my husband works a combination of evening/overnight shifts and I work eves/overnights on his days off. So basically we never have any days off together unless he uses a personal/vacation day or I don’t work (but I don’t have PTO benefits so that’s just money out of our pockets).
The switch means I lost all my benefits (PTO/insurance etc) so we now are on DH’s health plan which is 2x as much money. I also took a pay cut not being full time staff, and I also work fewer hours. It’s still more cost effective for us to do this than it would be to put our daughter in daycare.
Childcare costs are crazyyyyy.
Member$2,600 sounds pretty reasonable for what I know my friends pay. I have one friend who found a cheap family daycare in Brookline that’s quite a bit less, and I have another friend in Brookline who paid a lot more for a center. We do a nanny/nanny-share for my toddler. When we’re sharing it’s around $2,100/month for 40 hours/week. It’s great, but nailing the logistics with another family can be really tough.
Practice payments sound like a good idea. Good luck!
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