Daycare Costs Rival College Costs

When my daughter was born, I envisioned working from home with her peacefully napping nearby. When the reality of motherhood -- and a baby who never napped more on schedule -- set in, I realized I would need to find good daycare. I started with a good home-based daycare close to home. But then we moved to a new state and I went back to full-time work. We had to try try a variety of options including a home daycare, a YMCA-based program, a pricey private pre-school and finally, a wonderful pre-school where she stayed for three years.

The sticker shock of daycare was astonishing. While I felt fortunate to be able to afford it (especially since I was only paying one child's tuition), I quickly realized that if I were able to invest the money I
was spending on daycare ($525 a month on the low-end, $800 a month for the private school), we would likely have enough money saved for my daughter to attend any university with no problem!

As a personal finance writer, I've seen endless articles on how to afford to pay for college, but not nearly enough on how to  afford daycare. (How many articles have you seen telling newlyweds to start setting aside large sums of money for a daycare savings account, which they may need a lot sooner than college funds?)

Although my daughter is now old enough for public school, I can still empathize with parents writing those checks each month. And I was still thrilled to see the non-profit Consumer Action devote a substantial section of its recent fall issue to the issue of how to afford daycare.

I especially appreciated it when they pointed out that daycare often costs parents more than state-funded college tuition!

You can find helpful tips for finding more affordable daycare in the latest issue of Consumer Action News. Some of the tips include looking for subsidized care, using a Flexible Spending Account at work (count yourself lucky if you are lucky enough to have one), and making sure you take advantage of tax breaks for working parents.

I have no doubt that daycare costs are one of the reasons working families with young children are going deeper into debt, and are not able to pay for expenses like medical insurance. In fact, having children is the #1 predictor that a family will file for bankruptcy, according to Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi in their provocative book The Two Income Trap.

We must do better for children and their families. Daycare is a tough, demanding job and good providers deserve to be paid well for this important work. How about more programs to fund at-home daycares run by parents who want to stay home with their own children? Or moving to a model such as the one voters choose in Florida with a subsidized part-time pre-K program available to all four-year olds, regardles of family income?

Have you had to juggle your finances to pay for daycare? Have you found help getting affordable daycare? Join our discussion by adding your comments.

Comments

[Emma]

We've found daycare to be quite affordable when we got our finances in order. For us, it all came down to budgeting and knowing where all of our money was going.

What's crazy is that our annual daycare costs are less than what they will be when we send our daughter to private school 2 years from now.

[Tired but happy]

Daycare for our son (age 3) costs more than our mortgage, he only goes 3 days a week. We can afford it, but there's no way we could afford to have a second child til he's old enough for public kindergarten.

We're probably going to opt not to have a second child anyway, for a number of reasons, but the money issues are not the least of them.