Average Cost Of Raising A Child Per Year

A lot of this is obviously to do with class and geography - there will be areas of the country where Tim is a more manageable name than Kevin, and vice versa. Americans complicate name unnecessarily by insisting that Robin is a girl's name, and by not knowing that Chelsea is a football team. Do not be distracted. With luck and deep thought you may yet think of a name that isn't too ridiculous and hasn't been nabbed by someone else. Only recently, a friend told me with pride that his newborn nephew was going to be called Monty. It was the pride of a man who knew that there was no glut of Montys, that there might indeed be a shortage of Montys, even an absence of Montys. My daughter told him there was one in her class. His face fell with a clump.
 

Average Cost Of Raising A Child Per Year

But remember this. As you edge towards making your minds up, be aware that this child will carry its name for life, and will therefore be identified and even judged by these syllables that you will have decided on in only a couple of days when both of you were exhausted and slightly mad. Put it this way: Arbuthnot and Iolanthe might seem like a good idea right now, but they never will again, until the end of time.

Stuff 

IVAN: Nothing prepares you for the complete seismic change in your life that occurs when your child is born. Oh, it'll be wonderful. You don't think about it too much. And then suddenly you start seeing the money going out of your account on prams and pushchairs and all the rest of it. I remember that W cost us a thousand pounds before he was even born, and that was just on baby clothes and ridiculous prams and pushchairs. The pram I think we used three times before it was sold on, at some boot sale or something. Silver Cross pram. The most ridiculous piece of machinery ever invented. And things like baby chairs for cars and stuff. It's an expensive business.

Before baby, your home probably felt quite comfortably sized, with room enough for most of the things and people you wished to fit into it. After baby, Blenheim Palace would seem cramped. As you bring home mother-and-baby for the first time - they come as a package now - you will realize not only how little space you now have for them, but how little you will have for all the stuff you are going to have to buy in the coming days, months and years. Stuff. It's only a little word. In the old days it meant nice things, like cameras and hi-fi equipment and cars and enormous TVs. Anything that needed batteries. Anything that could be plugged in. And absolutely anything that came with a remote control. 

But now you are a father, and you are looking at a different kind of stuff. You can still buy all that electrical equipment, if you are a multimillionaire and you tell your partner you inherited it from a recently deceased aunt who had worked at Dixons. Otherwise your shopping hours will now be dedicated to the purchase of stuff for your baby. This, as everyone knows, costs a fortune. 

It is frequently suggested in newspapers, which have usually got the figure from other newspapers, that the cost of looking after a child from 0 to 18 years is upwards of £250,000. Or, if you choose the special bargain rate, four kids for a million. We'll throw in the first nappy for free. Can't say fairer than that, can we?
 

New fathers whose chests started palpitating towards the end of the last paragraph and have since been rushed to hospital will therefore not find out that this £250,000 figure seems to have been chosen completely at random. (When broken down into constituent expenses it often includes such necessities as twelve years of independent schooling and a new car on Junior's seventeenth birthday.) To find out more, you can check out Average Cost Of Raising A Child Per Year.