Starting a Family MM

Blackrock1 said:

Siblings have gone the approach of four kids in 5/6 years with two high pressure jobs and it seems to have worked well for them.

Just on the above, its the kinds of thing that may work for a period, but longer term its very hard, ironically kids are less work the younger they are if you have appropriate child care, its when they get older, get friends, hobbies etc is when they need more of your time (and you want to give it to them as well as they grow up)

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100% on this. Collecting kids from creche, you are home every evening and it all ticks away nicely. Fast forward to when you have kids going out every evening to sports or other activities, playdates and parties at weekends, sometimes needing to volunteer to get your kids into certain activities. It is a lot of juggling with 2/3 kids, even calling in all the favours and repaying them for lifts, supervision etc. It can be hard to get a nanny to do these things as well, especially if there are younger kids in tow as well. And you also want to be the person in the crowd for your kid, watching their progress at different activities and maybe motivating them to continue when it gets tough.

Look no-one would have kids at all if you thought about it but there is no harm in having a realistic view of it. I know I got great advice from an older sibling and also from watching how their life evolved. See if you can find someone who is ten years ahead of you and how your life might look and how your financial planning might fit into that to give you the choices you need. House set up sounds great and will give you loads of flexibility.

Unless the government increase the creche subsidy, creche is fairly unworkable with more than 2 kids. At 2 we stopped a creche and got a minder into the house (nanny). Planning a family is not like planning a career, house - its less predictable etc.
Good luck with it - planning 4-5 kids at nearly 40 is ambitious but go for it and good luck with it!

GAAmam said:

Unless the government increase the creche subsidy, creche is fairly unworkable with more than 2 kids.

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That depends on the creche. After the current minimum subsidy, the community creche our little person attended before starting free preschool cost the princely sum of €75. In preschool, the cost is down to €5 a week. The for-profit alternative would have been €20 a week more. The only real issue is capacity, which I think is an issue everywhere (in a lot of industries) for the last few years (we were also finding it almost impossible to find a nanny, the first 2 fell through and then we were lucky to be offered the creche place).

The point is, we would have had to have had a couple of sets of twins close together before a nanny made sense financially compared to a creche.

But we're outside Dublin (still in Leinster) so everything from housing to restaurants (with the exception of the major supermarkets) is basically half price compared to the extortion racket which seems to be de-rigueur in the leafy suburbs of Dublin. €1,100 a month for 2 kids post subsidy with one of them in free preschool is nuts- our equivalent would be less than half that with minimum subsidies.

There's lots of other major cost and other benefits to being outside Dublin but within the commuter belt- but that's a different thread!