[aantix]

When my wife and I had our first child, we lived in SF.

The neighborhood daycare in the Excelsior charged $1600/mo. This is five years ago.

We're about to have our fourth child. With the upcoming summer, if we still lived in SF, we'd have four children in daycare. $6,400/mo.

[tdhoot]

With four kids is it cheaper to just hire a nanny?

[manfredo]

So after daycare a couple making $0.5M/yr would "only" have $423,000 left to work with. What does rent cost? A 6 bedroom house can be rented for $11,500 a month [1]. So after rent and daycare the family has $285,000 to work with. Still very very far from struggling.

1. https://www.apartments.com/1934-powell-st-san-francisco-ca/e...

[deathanatos]

And that's giving each child their own bedroom and saving one for guests! I grew up with me and two siblings all in the same bedroom. (And honestly, it was alright, I'm probably better for it, and we definitely weren't poor by any measure. So, the figures above should be read as "if we spoil the children", IMO.)

[war1025]

A thing I think is funny is that so many people feel like their kids "need" their own bedroom, then as soon as college rolls around, "dorm life" is completely fine where they have one or more roommates living in a space that is often smaller than what their bedroom back home was.

[aantix]

Gross 500K, you're probably working with 300K after Fed/CA/SF taxes..

138K for rent.

76K for childcare if all four (might get a nanny cheaper)

Student loans because you both went to an Ivy League

Two cars, cell phones, real organic food, savings..

Maybe one big family vacation.

It adds up.

You won't be flying to Paris every weekend on a private jet.

[manfredo]

For married couple you'll still be looking at 320,000 in post-tax income at least - probably more if you have 4 kids. The rent is an over-estimate (6 bedroom house in central SF) and can easily be reduced.

[throwaway0516]

500k is pre-tax. The federal and state income taxes would be about $150k.

[tdhoot]

I think you're forgetting tax but I generally agree with your point.

[southphillyman]

Anyone living in a high COL city with multiple kids should look into importing an au pair. $2k a month would really help the au pair and her family back home and save the family potentially hundreds of dollars a month

[zulln]

> importing an au pair

No idea if this is the right terminology or not, but it makes it sound really weird in a bad way.

[michaelmrose]

Presumably because it refers to a person like a thing. Language often betrays our thoughts by being unnecessarily clear.

[michaelmrose]

Why do you think its OK to import people you can maximally exploit as live in slaves to safeguard the most important things in your life.

The minimum wage for NYC is $15 an hour and ultimately if you pay the minimum you get your pick of the worst employees.

[southphillyman]

I know multiple au pairs living in the tri state area (mostly NYC). They seem to love the arrangement and send a ton of money back home, earn college degrees here, etc. Honestly outside of the fact they need to acquire a visa I'm not sure how this is different from having a nanny (au pair make similar pay this isn't a means to rip someone off from what I know)

[toasterlovin]

Uh, pretty sure the OP is not envisioning enslaving someone. And the compensation for the au pair includes a place to live and (not sure about this) food.

[michaelmrose]

He said you ought to import a person like you would import an orange and specifically said it would be ok to pay them a substandard wage as it would still be a good deal to them so they could send money home for their family.

One doesn't acquire the services of mexican's to pick your fruit merely because they work hard. You do so because they will work hard for less.

Literally the only reason to bring in someone from out of country which is implicitly a larger effort is because you have implicit leverage over that person and can use that leverage to extract more work for less money.

Further the broader context was meeting budgetary constraints.

In brief he said that in order to save money you ought to bring someone in from out of country so that you can use your leverage over them to get more work for less money while ignoring your fellow Americans looking for work because they expect things like benefits and fair pay which cost money.

[IanCal]

It's not "leverage" it's about different expectations. You're not hiring professional childminders, the goal is to have someone come and live with you and be more like part of the family. You give them a room, I would expect food, and also pay them. Since in the US you need to go through an agency I don't think it would be a great deal of work.

> ignoring your fellow Americans looking for work because they expect things like benefits and fair pay which cost money.

Almost a quarter are from Germany. Most European countries do not consider America to be somewhere with many employee benefits.

Is $24,000 after room and board an unfair wage? What's the cost of a room in NYC?

[toasterlovin]

> He said you ought to import a person like you would import an orange

It's awkward phrasing, but you don't know that they meant to compare people to commodities. Lots of people on this site do not speak English as their native language.

> Literally the only reason to bring in someone from out of country which is implicitly a larger effort is because you have implicit leverage over that person and can use that leverage to extract more work for less money.

They don't work for less because you have leverage over them. They work for less because they are not permanent residents of the U.S. and their cost of living is calibrated to their own country, which is typically less developed than the U.S.

But that's if they work for less. The price OP quoted was $2k/month. If you add on $500 in free housing, it works out to the same annual compensation as the $15/hour you cited (assuming 2000 hours/year @ $15/hour). And, FWIW, when I've looked into an au pair in the past, $2k seemed like the lower end of what they cost.

[6d6b73]

That's your choice isn't it?

[war1025]

Based on their comment, the choice they made was to no longer live in SF. So yes, it was their choice, and they made it.

[gnaritas]

> my wife and I

One of you stay home and raise your kids; that's rather the point of getting married.

> With the upcoming summer, if we still lived in SF, we'd have four children in daycare. $6,400/mo.

If paying other people to raise your kids is even on the table, you're doing it wrong.