Can We Afford to Have Another Kid?

Every few weeks someone emails me around midnight: “We’re thinking about another baby. Can we afford it?”

Here’s the part where I’m supposed to launch Excel and build a model. But the truth? The numbers don’t matter.

I mean they do. But not in the way you think. Asking a financial planner if you can “afford” another kid is like asking a cardiologist if you should fall in love. The heart’s involved, sure. But that’s not really their lane.

Conventional planning loves to turn this into a math problem. Plug in my detailed estimate: $30k to $40k annually to raise a child through age 17, before college. But if you add NYC childcare that costs as much as a mortgage. Toss in 529s, health premiums, a bigger apartment, a larger car, and the career hit when one of you inevitably scales back.

The spreadsheet lights up like a Christmas tree. Green means you’re “fine.” Yellow means “tight.” Red means “good luck.” 

None of it means anything. Because people don’t have kids for spreadsheet-approved reasons, and they don't have them for balance-sheet ones either.

Here's what I've learned watching families make this decision over the past decade: the financial question is never actually about the finances. It's a proxy war for about seventeen other anxieties, most of which have nothing to do with money.

The person who asks "can we afford it?" is really asking: Will this break us? Will we lose our freedom? Will we be trapped? Will we resent this decision in three years when we're zombified from sleep deprivation and our friends are posting Instagram stories from Tulum?

These are legitimate questions. They're just not questions a Monte Carlo simulation can answer.

The actual costs that matter aren't in my estimate. They're the opportunity costs no one wants to say out loud:

Nobody puts this in the financial plan, but it's what people are actually calculating when they stare at the ceiling at 2 AM.

If you're going to think about this financially, and you should, at least partially, because money is real and constraints matter. Here's what you should actually be asking:

Can we absorb the hit without catastrophic damage?

Not "can we afford it" in some theoretical sense, but: If we do this, and it costs more and derails more than we expect (and it will), will we end up in a place we can't recover from?

That's a different calculation. It's not about whether you can technically cash-flow another kid. It's about resilience. Margin. The financial equivalent of asking if you have enough cushion to take a punch.

Here's my framework, which is less spreadsheet and more stress test:

1. Can you handle career disruption?

If one of you scales back or exits the workforce for a year or two, does your financial foundation crack? Do you have emergency reserves that can cover 12+ months? Can the other person's income carry you?

2. Are you already stretched?

If you're currently running at 95% of capacity, emotionally, financially, logistically, you don't have the slack for another dependent. It's like adding more cargo to a ship that's already riding low in the water. Technically possible, disastrous in practice.

3. What's your recovery window?

If this goes sideways, career setback, medical issues, whatever crisis you haven't imagined yet, how long until you're back to baseline? If you're 32, you have time to rebuild. If you're 42, the math is different.

4. What are you giving up?

Not in theory, specifically... Are you deferring early retirement? Saying no to the business you wanted to start? Accepting that the brownstone stays a pipe dream? Make the trade explicit. Resentment grows in the gap between expectations and reality.

If you insist on framing it financially, ask this instead: Can we absorb the hit without catastrophic damage?

Because this isn’t about whether you can technically cash-flow another kid. It’s about whether your life (and your balance sheet) have enough margin to take a punch.

Think in terms of resilience, not affordability:

What dream dies to make room for this one? Be specific. Pretending you can “do it all” just guarantees resentment later.

Here's the part where I'm supposed to say something uplifting about how kids are priceless and you'll figure it out and love conquers all.

I'm not going to do that.

Sometimes the financially responsible answer is no. Sometimes the right call is to protect what you've built rather than stretch for more. Sometimes recognizing your constraints is the most adult thing you can do.

And sometimes, often, actually, people who "can't afford it" by every rational metric go ahead anyway and figure it out. They're exhausted and broke and wouldn't change a thing. Because humans are terrible at optimizing for happiness, and that's usually fine.

My point isn't that money doesn't matter. It's that money is a constraint, not the decision. You're not trying to afford a kid the way you're trying to afford a car. You're trying to figure out if you want to commit to a decade-plus of reduced financial flexibility in exchange for... well, another entire human being with their own consciousness and needs and personality.

When someone asks me this question, here's what I do:

I run the numbers. Not because the numbers decide anything, but because knowing your constraints is useful. If you're in the red zone, that's information. If you're in the green zone, that's different information.

Then I ask what they're afraid of. Because that's the real question underneath. Usually it's something like: "We'll never travel again" or "We won't be able to give the older one everything they deserve" or "I'll lose myself completely."

Those fears might be valid. They might not be. But at least they're the actual conversation.

And then I shut up, because this isn't a financial planning problem. It's a life decision that happens to have financial implications.

Can you afford another kid?

Probably not, by any pure financial optimization standard. Also: that's completely irrelevant.

The better question is: Given your actual resources, risk tolerance, and life goals, is this a trade you want to make?

Because that's what it is… a trade. You're trading money and freedom and simplicity for chaos and cost and complexity. Whether that trade makes sense depends entirely on what you value and what you're afraid of losing.

The spreadsheet can tell you if you'll go broke. It can't tell you if you'll be happy. It can't tell you if you'll regret not doing it. It can't tell you if your first kid would love a sibling or if your marriage can handle the pressure or if you'll look back in twenty years and wish you'd been braver.

Those are the calculations that actually matter. And unfortunately, there's no formula for them.

Run the numbers if it makes you feel better. But then make the decision like a human, not a spreadsheet. Because in the end, almost nobody says "I wish I'd had fewer kids so I could have retired at 62 instead of 65."

What they say is: "I'm glad we did it" or "I'm glad we didn't." Both can be true. Both can be right. The only wrong answer is pretending money is the deciding factor when it never really was.