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by sxywu
4630 days ago
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I took the cost of living from Economic Policy Institute's Family Budget Calculator, and their documentation [1] is particularly interesting to sift through. In particular, the child care costs are apparently broken down like this:
One parent, one child = cost of 4-year-old care
One parent, two children = cost of 4-year-old care + cost of one school-age child
One parent, three children = cost of 4-year-old care + cost of two school-age children
Two parents, one child = cost of 4-year-old care
Two parents, two children = cost of 4-year-old care + cost of one school-age child
Two parents, three children = cost of 4-year-old care + cost of two school-age children And they assume the school-age children to require both before-school and after-school care. As for comparing a cost of living for a two-parent household with the income of a single worker, I could only make that assumption because...how would I be able to extrapolate the household income of a two-parent family from BART salaries? As imperfect a solution as it is, I still hope that it will give insight, since my hope was not to shove any particular opinions on anyone, but rather just a tool for exploration. [1] http://www.epi.org/publication/wp297-2013-family-budget-calc... |
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Though I understand figuring out the second parent's income is difficult, I think it's more dangerous to entirely exclude it. To me it comes off as misinformation (especially when combined with the childcare costs).
You can consider a hideable layer that allows the user to put the second parent's income, and default it to the average Bay Area income. I'm guessing that even if you defaulted it to 20-percentile for income, cost of living would no longer exceed household income, which is extremely important information in this discussion.