Well, the tax laws in the US make it difficult for even upper-middle-class couples to have one member of the couple stay home and take care of the kids. My wife (of 3 weeks) is 29, I'm 28. We're not planning on having kids until she's 32 or 33. Though we're both lawyers, it will be difficult, if not impossible, for one of us to stay home full-time with any kids we might have since cost-of-living is so high where we live (DC Metro area) and taxes take a huge chunk out of our income. We'd love to have 4 or more kids, but that just doesn't seem realistic.
Congratulations on your recent marriage :-)
Can either of you eventually work from home? That might not work if you and your wife are trial lawyers, but if you put your minds to it, a solution could be found. You and your wife are going to have to make some tough decisions regarding having kids. Of course you realize that you get tax deductions for kids, right? Don't put it off too long. Mother Nature can be cruel.
Can you move to a less expensive area and commute?
Good luck, and best wishes.
From a Freeper who has been married for 17 years, and got married at 30 to a woman of 29, also both with good jobs, let me offer some words of advice:
1) Be positive about it and expect things will work out.
2) Your greatest joy in life will be your children. We have three now and at age 47 I can think of nothing that is more important to me, except my country and my faith. Don't cheat yourself because you don't think you will be able to afford them.
3) If you have to, move to a lower cost-of-living area when your wife stops working to raise the children. [This happened to us with the birth of our second -- we moved from high-rent Menlo Park CA to lower-rent San Diego.]
4) Finally, don't let the financial planners and Money Magazine scare you about the cost of raising children. They will have you fretting about the need to put $5K away each year to pay for their college or some such nonsense. Just work hard and trust that this will all work out. It did for our parents -- mine didn't do any financial planning, yet we all went to college -- and it will for you, too.
Good luck and God bless.
This is also very true. In some areas of the country - including mine - it is very difficult to own a home in a decent area and still have one parent stay home with children. We've accepted that we will probably both have to work when we start a family. We don't like it, but that's reality.
I just don't get the long-term cohabitation thing, like I said before.
"We'd love to have 4 or more kids, but that just doesn't seem realistic."
Move.
"Though we're both lawyers, it will be difficult, if not impossible, for one of us to stay home full-time with any kids we might have since cost-of-living is so high where we live (DC Metro area) and taxes take a huge chunk out of our income. We'd love to have 4 or more kids, but that just doesn't seem realistic."
I find this post very interesting, when I suggest that the purchasing power of the average working man is falling I am lambasted for being a fool but here you are saying that one attorney cannot earn enough to support a family without his attorney wife also working. My father was a carpenter with an eighth grade education and he was able to support a wife and four sons while my mother stayed home and kept house. You seem to support everything that I have been saying and yet there are plenty of people who disagree with me.
I suspect that an attorney with a moderately successful practice would earn as much in one reasonably good week as my father ever earned in an entire year, (speaking in terms of unadjusted dollars).
Congratulations on your recent marriage!
For your perusal, I'd like to recommend a book called The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle Class Mothers and Fathers are Going Broke, by Harvard law professor and bankruptcy expert Elizabeth Warren.
It's a misnomer that families *have* to have two incomes, and Warren points out that in some ways the financial situation of a two-income couple is worse than the family with a stay-at-home mother.
She also has some concrete suggestions for young couples as to how to organize their finances so that it *is* possible for mom to stay at home.
She is even one of the few mainstream authors I've seen who also points out the economic advantages of homeschooling (it frees the family from having to live in a "good school district," with accompanying premium-price housing.)
I think there's a lot to be said for larger families. (We were willing, but nature didn't cooperate, so we have only three, but they are all blessings.) It's not that much more expensive to have more children if Mom is at home with them. Kids don't need expensive toys, lots of classes, their own room, designer clothes, etc. The formative advantages of having a dedicated and engaged mother at home during their preschool years is invaluable.