Yes, it is. If you'd have told me I'd have thought like this 2 years ago, I'd have laughed at you. 10 years ago I'd have bet significant money against it.

You're in the same boat. Many people are. The fact is many couples have 2 professionals working to help support their families. If they are lucky, they can both make decent salaries (instead of 1 working making a great salary and one staying home). This is just the reality of life in the United States. It's hard to get ahead, and even harder to stay ahead. If I'm stressing about this and in the top 10% of earners in the US, it really makes me wonder wtf the other 90% are stressing about and dealing with.

It actually is a bit sad...but that is a topic for the politics forum I guess.

You need to ask yourselves if your jobs are remotely portable. There are a lot of places in the US that have great public schools. They don't tend to be in areas with cheap real estate, but they do tend to be in places with good job markets for people like you and your wife. I'm thinking of some parts of Texas (which for some reason has a bunch of these places in DFW, Houston, and Austin), and other places (like Louisville, KY ironically... I'm not talking about JCPS I'm talking about Anchorage).

There are probably suburban places around Philly that basically exist to create independent school districts that are excellent.

I may be in the minority on this, but if I am in a good school district, I am sending my children to public schools. I know that you are not, so in that case I would send them to much more affordable private schools. I would place the difference in cost in an investment fund for my child that they can have when they graduate from college. In my mind and experience, having the ability to start a business or get a headstart on your adult life is more valuable than a degree from a certain school unless you have a very particular career path in mind. My opinion may be incorrect, as I went to public school and then a public university, but it has been my experience.
If you are spending 15k less per year on education from k-12 and assuming 6% compounding interest calculated monthly, that is 327k that your child has that you have saved for them from grades k-12. That is a hell of a head start no matter what path they decide to take. Maybe some people value the shot of a better education higher than that type of head start, but I don't. Getting into great schools and networking can do wonders for your career, but so can going in with 327k.
If you make 300k per year or more as a family, this point may be moot, but in your situation it's what I would consider heavily.

If you let it, this kind of stuff can completely stress you out, but at some point you just need to take a step back and decide what your priorities are, what your resources are, and what your options are.

Everyone wants "the best" for their kids, but if you don't make $500k/yr, you are not doing your kid any favors by looking at the lifestyle of families that make that kind of money and becoming stressed and miserable. You kid doesn't want a stressed and miserable dad, especially because there is a chance the stress turns into resentment toward the kid.

Just went through a mini-version of this with my wife who got sticker shock about the cost of our upcoming vacation. I told her that it was because our son increased the cost of the trip 50%, and she thought I was joking, but it worked out to just about that: an extra plane ticket, scheduling the flights at times convenient for traveling with a 4 year old (rather than taking a cheaper overnight or early morning flight), more expensive hotel room (getting a 1 bedroom suite w sofa bed instead of standard hotel room).

In fact, we could probably stay w friends and skip the hotel entirely if we didn't have the kid along.

Kids are expensive and money just won't go as far as you use to think it would. You still have enough to live a very pleasant and comfortable lifestyle, but I confess my eyes did bug out of my head when I paid $20k/yr for private daycare. It is a better deal than $20k for kindergarten imo, but it still came as a shock to me.

If it were me, I would go for a cheaper school up until like 5th or 6th grade and then go for the top tier. That should give enough time to adjust and 'catch up' if needed before high school starts.

Privileged people ITT. Also, good arguments to never have kids.

Interesting thread, I havent had the chance to read all of it, so I am semi-grunching.

Disclaimer:
I am German, went to a boarding school in the US for one year that was in the mentioned price range.


I definitely think my education there wasnt even close to the price we paid for it. Compared to the German public school system (which is pretty good) it wasnt even comparable.
I enjoyed my time there and I certainly learned a lot, but from a pure educational standpoint, it definitely wasnt worth it.
So, definitely do a lot of research on the schools, if you end up doing this.

A huge problem with my school was the fact that the students there were spoiled rich kids that were brain dead and their parents werent able to properly raise them (a lot of them threw there phones through the room after conversations with their parents). This isnt an environment I want my kids to grow up in as it has zero value.


Now a different angle. I read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell which studies the subject of successful people and one chapter covers school education.
The studies showed that children from a poor background werent doing worse during school time, but they really lost when they werent in school.
Rich kids studied during the 3 month summer break, poor kids didnt. Stuff like this did matter a lot more than money, but it was obviously high correlated.

Maybe pick up the book to get a perspective on this.


Also, shipping your kids off to boarding school at a young age will not give you the possibility to raise them according to your own values.


I know you asked about financing and from my experience the people were rich as ****.

We may very well do this. Wait until 5th grade, then enroll into private. That'll give us 10 years to save and hopefully increase our earnings.

I think it's pretty obvious most people here are not from privileged backgrounds. I already said I grew up in a blue collar neighborhood, in fact, it might be a bit less than that. We had what we needed but there were no extras. Food/bus fare/school (catholic) was paid for, but pretty much everything else we were on our own. I worked since I was 13. Other people have stated they are from similar backgrounds.

It may be exactly the reason we are discussing this. I don't want my kid to struggle like I did. I don't want her to have to go through tough experiences. In the end, there is a pool of resources which is limited and as parents you have to decide where you want those resources to go. If you have a 140k pool of cash every year and say to yourself "ok, am I spending 15% of this on my child's education, or am I buying a new car?" It just depends on where you are willing to cut back to make it all work.

And yes, it's a very good argument against having kids. Just looking for a new house and having a baby is raising the cost of the what we are looking for at least 20% because we need 2 extra bedrooms. One for us, one for her, an office and a guest room. If not for her, we'd be fine with 3 bedrooms. jb9's vacation story is also a perfect example. Everything costs more because you are now including another person.

Yeah. Kids are a kick in the nuts. It really is a nice experience though, albeit stressful.

Don't you thing that some of the struggles that you went through is what made you the person you are today? I'm not advocating giving your kid a hunting knife and dropping them off in the woods at the age of 6 and wishing them good luck but you seem to be advocating completely shelter your child. It seems like you want them to be a spoiled rich kid without actually being a rich kid. I have to agree with the others in this thread who have advised you to move to a better public school system. If you sit down and objectively look at how much of yours and your families future you are sacrificing in terms of retirement savings and quality of life and compare that to what your child could possibly be gaining by attending a 20k school at the age of 6 I don't see how you can conclude it to be a good idea. I am also under the opinion though that you could be doing more harm than good by sending them to an expensive private school vs a quality public school.

wil,

You haven't responded to the option of moving to an upper class suburb with good public schools around Philly. Any reason why?

I've thought exactly this, that the challenges I've faced have made me a stronger and more experienced person. It didn't take me long to reject this line of thought. In the end, you can be a strong-willed person who can face challenges whether you struggled earlier in life or not. Wouldn't you have rather had the better background to go along with it?

I've had many experiences with people who have faced adversity and simply given up and made all the wrong choices. I don't think having a great education and background will increase the chances of a person being weaker. In fact, it might put more pressure on them to perform better.

This line of thought is open for discussion though. I'm still working on this whole theory.

I also doubt very much this approach could harm her more than help her. At worst she'll be an educated snob. Don't think of it in terms of "rich kid", because she won't be. Think of it as "highly educated kid", which is what we want.

One other thing to take note... the men in my family haven't had a good history of living very long. My father died at 58. His father died in his 40s. I very much doubt I'll be here in 20 years, and almost positive I won't be here in 30. There is a sense of urgency here. Everything I'm doing is for them, not me. I invest money and put quite a bit into "our" retirement, knowing fully well I'll probably never see it. It's not for me, it's for them. In case anything happens to me, I want to ensure I did everything I could to set the kid up before I go down for the dirt nap (my wife will be fine, she'll have money and she has a career, and she is very disciplined). Part of all this is a plan for my daughter's kids to have an even better shot. To come from a highly educated family and be well off. I definitely didn't come from that, and my daughter will have limited resources from us (and we aren't all that educated). Her kids, however, may have a shot to be in fantastic shape. That's what I want. My parents came here as immigrants and did the best they could and I'm eternally grateful. I'm going to do the same for her.

I'm open to this. The issue right now is that we want to buy a house but to make it work we need to be near her parents because they help us with many things. We can pretty much drop the baby off and go run errands if we want, or go out to dinner for 3 hours and come back and they are happy to watch her. Her father is retired and her mother works part time so it works out well for everyone. Her parents live in a good area (probably one of the best areas in Philadelphia actually), so we're happy to buy near them.

Like I said, we still have a few years so we can go down that route of moving to a more affluent suburb with a good school, but if we want to stay in the area we plan on buying, we might be better off sending her private and staying there. There are still some moving parts to all of this, like what our incomes will be later. I'm simply preparing a gameplan for the worst case scenarios now so we don't get sticker shock 5 years from now and say "we should have been more prepared for this". Or at least, that's what my wife will say to me to make me feel bad.

Definitely not good publics in Austin. School systems here are a complete joke. But private schools might not be as insanely expensive.

No, but Leander is good.

That's really admirable. Props, you are a good man. Your daughter is in good hands.

IMO cheaper private school is the way to go. The success of a child depends so much more on the parents than a classroom.

LOL. Definitely not. My wife went there.

From what I have heard, recently the HSs split and one is decent and one is god awful. Even still, with Robin Hood, the State School Board made of Jesus Freaks, and standardized testing galore, it's a disaster here.

This.

Not to sound too sentimental, but it's actually the other way around.

The people saying that a good private school won't provide much more don't know many private school kids imo. I knew quite a few kids going to top tier private schools. I went to several graduations. Let me asure you all that the difference is black and white. The kids from my school (low-end private) were accepted into state schools and community colleges. When I went to graduations at the top tier schools, a kid that was only going to a state school stuck out like a sore thumb. It was just a roll call of ivy league and other big time programs, many with academic scholarships.

What, exactly, is low-end private? I'm unsure of the terms you guys are using.

But those top tier private schools are selective with who they let in in the first place.

Wow, this thread is a real eye opener for me. I have 2 very young boys. My household income is a little higher than the OP, but in the same ballpark.

My plan is to go with public school initially, and preferable keep my kids in public school through high school. Only if the public schools appear to be really terrible or unsafe would I consider sending my kids to an expensive private school.

The big difference between my values and the OP is that I don't think that giving my kid the best chance to go to an ivy league college is my top priority. It seems like in today's environment, that means pressure starting in early grade school to get into the best middle schools, pressure to make sure your extracurricular resume keeps up with the other rich kids with crazy moms and unlimited financial resources, etc. And that pressure continues through jr high and high school. I'm not sure that is going to lead to a happy child. i'm not sure that is going to lead to a good person.

I went to an average public high school, good public college, and then went to a top 10 med school. My med school class had a lot of the private school and ivy league types. I found that a lot of those kids were the kids I hated. Whereas a lot of the guys that went to public high schools became my best friends. It wasn't a perfect correlation. Some of the private/Ivy people were pretty cool and some of the public school people were freaks, but overall I'd say there was a pretty strong pattern that I noticed.

Maybe the private/Ivy kids in my med school were just a bad batch, but that experience has shaped my plans for my kids.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that in a business/finance forum there is a strong tilt toward getting in to top schools to make connections to rich people to try to make tons of money.

Suck it up and move to Bucks County.

/thread

Everyone has experiences with other people that will shape their views of the world. If your case, it seems you are correlating a happy child with becoming a "good" person. I would think many people would disagree or at least debate that sentiment.

In the end what are we looking for? What exactly is a "good" person? I know many people with terrible morals and are unsuccessful. I also know people with great morals that are very successful. This would go against your example. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm simply saying it is much more open for debate than people may think.

In the end, you can have a good/bad, successful/unsuccessful, happy/unhappy child, but in the end if you can raise the chances and opportunities in each category, then why wouldn't you? Good/bad would probably be a combination of home life and friends. Successful/unsuccessful would probably be through education and opportunities and natural intelligence. Happy/unhappy would probably be also through home life and friends/personal relationships.

I can have a direct impact on all 3 categories, but one category can likely be impacted by money (education). Why would I not choose to exercise that?

Some people react well to pressure. Some don't. My view is that children are resilient, and as long as you don't go to extremes, will respond in a positive way to some pressure to succeed. People have a natural tendency to take it easy in life and be averse to constant change and challenges. Some pressure or nudging in the right direction can work wonders. I know for a fact if I'd have had some direction or advice in certain key points in my life I'd have winded up in a better position than I am now. Hell, most people I know would too. Who do you know that wouldn't love to go back and change quite a few choices when it comes to career or education?

Like I said, there are many very valid arguments on both sides, but if every single person in this thread were multi-millionaires, I would think the debate would be an absolute landslide towards private school.

This. Or Montgomery county

Youll have none of these problems with the public schools around here. The benefit of that way outweighs having her parents around to watch her. Babysitters arent expensive.