Entries Tagged 'Children' ↓

My husband and I are both fortunate to have generous parents who paid for most of our college expenses.  From my experience, it seems that in the Asian community parents are always expected to pay for their children’s higher education. I have even heard of stories of some parents who take money from their homes or retirement  to pay for a son or daughter’s schooling. Now that I am expecting a child, I am wondering if parents are really obligated to pay for their children’s higher education.  After all, parents already spend considerable time and money raising a child into an adult.  Should they be obligated to pay the expenses of their legally adult children  for another four years or more?

My personal take on this is that parents really have no obligation to pay for college after raising their children to age eighteen because they have done enough.  Parents who pay for their kids’ college expenses are bestowing their children a huge gift, but when something comes too easily  it may not be appreciated as much as something earned by hard work. I have met quite a few classmates who had everything paid for and then later dropped out because they did not focus on their studies.  On the other hand,  I know some people who did not have parental help during college who worked extremely hard and ended up doing quite well.  They did so well precisely because they did not have a parental financial cushion, and they knew that they needed to work hard and  be on the top to win more scholarships and internships.

Some parents use the fact that they are paying for college to dictate many aspects of their children’s lives, and I really think that is worse than not paying for college.  I know too many people who hated what they were studying in college but still soldiered on because they felt like they were obligated to please their parents by graduating with a degree in a certain major. Many of these classmates ended up doing something radically different from their college majors after they were out of college and tasted freedom.  These outcomes make the parental sponsored schooling almost pointless.

When parents refuse to pay for their children’s higher education, they are basically letting the young adults become independent right after highschool.  That is not a bad thing at all because there has to be a point where parents let go of their children and let them survive on their own.  I have to admit that I only felt true freedom after I graduated from college and got my first job because I truly no longer depended on my parents. For some people higher education is not necessary for success, and letting a young adult explore the possibilities outside of an institutionalized education system might also be beneficial.

In closing, I think parents should not feel obligated to pay for their children’s higher education unless they are legally ordered to do so by a court. I would probably help my kid with college expenses since I am sure any school will become extremely expensive in 18 years, but I would help in the form of a loan of some sort.  As the cost of higher education rises it is impossible to expect parents to afford everything and the college aged children will have to pitch in by securing scholarships, grants, and work to fund their own education if they want it.

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This is a topic my husband and I have discussed numerous times since his parents packed up, sold and gave away practically everything,  and became missionaries. Now that we are expecting a baby we are considering it further.  If we were to move we would probably go to our house in Chino Hills, and here is a list of pros and cons that came up in our discussions.

First, I think the biggest thing that I have kvetched about is the cost of living here in the Bay Area.  My husband and I both feel some of the nesting instinct now and he really wants his kid to grow up in a nice house with a backyard, like the one he grew up in. I think it is  reasonable to wish that  your child’s life to be as good or even better than yours.   To have a house comparable to the one we have in Chino Hills we would need over a million dollars here.  The school district in Chino Hills has elementary and middle schools with API scores over 900, and that kind of scores also give real estate a further premium here in the Bay Area. The amount of mortgage we pay on the Chino Hills home is less than our rent for a two bedroom apartment here, and it just seems ridiculous that we cannot reasonably afford the same quality of life here in the Bay Area even though we have above average incomes.

We both expect that we will not make as much money down south.  There just aren’t that many high tech companies there, and the unemployment rate in the Inland Empire is much higher than here in the Silicon Valley right now.  However, we are both pretty talented and graduated from the top engineering programs in the nation so we are pretty confident we will find something.  Chino Hills is also situated right on the border of Orange County so there are job opportunities there.  Of course, we will try to find jobs there before we decide to leave.

There are some  circumstances that could keep us in the Bay Area forever. One big thing is family.  Right now pretty much all of our family members live within an one hour drive and having that support system is quite valuable. We also have more friends here in the Bay Area than in Southern California.     Also, if we cannot find reasonable employment down south then we would probably just stay here.  The hubby also likes the weather here a lot more, but Southern California is actually sunnier and I prefer that more.

Anyway, we are not planning to move right now or even right after the baby is born.  The hubby is thinking of making a decision on this sometime before the kid enters elementary school so it may happen in five years, or not at all. I am definitely all for moving to a  higher quality of life if possible.  Meanwhile I am also working on generating a good non-salary income so that we can go wherever we want to.

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Well, my hubby has finally done it.  We are officially pregnant.  He actually banned me from telling anyone until he made sure he saw the little amorphous blob’s heartbeat yesterday.  After he got home from the hospital he was super excited and wrote a post himself.  He called it a nooblet, which is a term taken from this nerdy gamer show called  Pure Pwnage.

The doctor told us that the due date is 10/31, and my hubby said, “Nooo!  I don’t want a Halloween baby!”  However, very few women actually deliver on their calculated due dates, so he may not be getting a Halloween baby.  Personally, I think that would be kind of neat, because our kid could invite other kids over for costumed birthday parties.

My husband and I are already talking about what leave we could take when the baby arrives.  Personally I will have about a month of paid vacation saved up, and then we both can get 6 weeks of California Paid Family Leave.  The paid family leave is paid at 55% of our salary from the SDI program which we pay into.  There is no California income tax on that money and we could spread out the leave between the two of us so it would not be a very big financial strain.  I do not think I would qualify for the pregnancy disability leave because my job mostly consists of thinking and typing and I am allowed to work at home.  Unless I am ordered by the doctor to bedrest I would not be considered disabled. Anyway, we will both talk to our HR departments soon.  All things considered, November is actually a good month to have the baby because there are already many paid holidays in November and December during the holiday season, and it would be more relaxing to take time off then because most other people will be taking time off.  Also, we can claim the baby as a tax exemption for the entire year and save some money on taxes.

Another thing we have to consider is which health insurance plan to add our baby to.  My husband currently has a PPO plan and I have Kaiser HMO.    Right now both of us pay very little for our health insurance because our employers pretty much covered everything.  Kaiser is really convenient for us because the hospital is about a mile away and they have everything there.  It is likely that we will just add the child to my insurance, and this will cost about $100 more a month.

Anyway, before all of that happens, I have to actually get through this pregnancy.  So far my hubby is thankful that I am not puking my guts out.  I am actually feeling pretty good and I am eating more than usual.  I am also sleeping a lot, so I am blogging quite a bit less.  I guess after the baby is born I would also be a “mommy blogger”, but I promise I will not be chronicling every diaper rash.

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Before I begin, I will flat out admit that  Idiocracy is a pretty stupid film overall.  The premise of the movie was that imbeciles were procreating at a faster rate than highly educated people so after 500 years the whole earth was filled with idiots.  They created giant piles of trash and watered their crops with energy drinks.  It was a dumb movie, and my husband said he felt stupider after watching it.

The first time I got reminded of Idiocracy was when we watched Wall-E in the theatre.  These two movies both had giant piles of trash and also a very similar ending. The main difference was that Wall-E’s protagonists were cute little robots.  After watching that movie my husband said, “Idiocracy ruined Wall-E for me”.

This week I remembered the story of Idiocracy again after reading about Nadya Suleman.  Nadya Suleman is the mother of the now famous octuplets.  Apparently she now has a total of 14 kids.  Three of her older six kids are disabled so she’s receiving food stamps and money for them, and she funded her invitro treatments with her disability payments.  She is unemployed and now Kaiser is demanding money from MediCal to pay for the care of her octuplets.

I totally believe that everyone should be able to have as many kids as they want, but people need to understand that kids are huge responsibilities financially, physically, and emotionally.  An understanding these of responsibilities is what prevents a lot of folks from having a lot of kids, and this was illustrated in the movie Idiocracy.

So what’s my point?  I actually do not believe that book smarts is totally hereditary so I think it is possible that parents that are considered to be “dumb” can have very successful children. Basically, I do not believe that the world in Idiocracy would actually become a reality.  However, I am pretty annoyed by people who are perpetually unemployed and have  kids just to milk the system and collect welfare checks or discounted housing.   If you intend to provide for the kids you have and find a way to do it then there is nothing wrong with having tons of kids.  In fact, I admire the Duggar family of Arkansas a lot for what they are doing with their brood of 18.

With that said, if Nadya Suleman gets a reality show I think I would puke, because that would be true idiocracy.

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Today the hubby and I once again discussed the idea of having one of us stay at home when we have a kid. I have researched the costs of daycare in San Mateo and it is very expensive. We can definitely afford it but from what I read many infant care facilities are not only expensive, but have extremely long waiting lists. One of the Wise Bread writers I met last week used to live in Redwood City and she said that she signed up to be on the wait list of one of the daycares with a better reputation while she was pregnant and she got a call back when her daughter was two! That’s pretty crazy and makes me want to put myself on the list right now. Anyway, the hubby expressed interest in being a stay at home dad before, and I asked him about it again.

Financially, my income is still above the San Mateo median if we became an one income family. I used our actual incomes and plugged it into this second income calculator at MSN money. According to the calculator if we lose my hubby’s income but he takes care of our kid we would lose about $12500 a year and that doesn’t seem like all that much. The hubby makes a decent income as a game programmer, but we are taxed quite a bit on that second income so the biggest savings we get is on taxes. I plugged in daycare costs at $1200 a month, but that’s actually a pretty low estimate because apparently Google employees will be shelling out $2500 a month for their top of the line on campus daycare. I consider my hubby to be a top of the line caretaker considering his intelligence and attentiveness towards kids so when I plug in $2500 a month for daycare obviously we come out ahead by having the hubby stay at home. Additionally, right now the hubby commutes about 50 miles a day to and from work so we will save a few hundred a month on gas. If I were to stay home, we would lose more money because my base salary is about 12% higher than the hubby’s and I have been getting bigger raises than the hubby just because the type of companies I work for pay more. If the hubby stayed in enterprise software he would be making more money than me right now because he has one more year of experience and he graduated from an elite school. However, he is in games right now and every software engineer knows that you work in games for love and not money.

The main issue is that I am afraid that the hubby would not want to give up his career, but he said that he really would love to be a stay at home at dad. He thinks that he would have a lot of free time for his own projects because he always wanted to make his own games. He also has tons of movies he would like to watch, dozens of books he wants to read, and so much stuff he wants to learn. Additionally, he just loves babies. Then I asked him if he would be lonely, and he said that he could just hang out with all the other stay at home parents he knows. We do know a stay at home dad from church with three kids and several stay at home moms that are our friends. Besides that, one of the hubby’s best friends has a work schedule where he gets home in the early afternoon so they could hang out. In terms of jobs, it is also generally easier for a man to get back to a career after taking a little hiatus. If he really uses his time to create games on his own then he would be even more attractive to future employers., or if he really makes great games he could sell them on the internet by himself.

Anyway, this is all hypothetical because we don’t have kids yet, but it is good to know that the hubby wouldn’t mind being a stay at home parent. I have read many blog posts by women whose husbands tried out the stay at home thing and got ridiculously bored and went back to work, but I guess it’s mostly because they didn’t have any projects of their own. I am not too worried about the hubby having nothing to entertain himself with because he has a ton of games he hasn’t started playing yet and he is one of those nerds that could just sit there and think for hours for fun. The hubby wants to finish the game at his workplace first, and then we may work on actually trying to having a kid and this stay at home dad thing may actually happen.

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