Money on the Mind: To Have Kids or Not to Have Kids

0:02Felix Salmon: Hello! Welcome to a very special episode of, well, crossover episode of Slate Money with Death, Sex and Money. The two Slate podcasts that have money in the title.

0:18Anna Sale: Bringing the death and sex to money.

0:21Felix Salmon: I feel like I'm very happy about this because, well, I should introduce myself. I am Felix Zaman of Slate Money, which is a kind of blank slate title where you can put anything in if it's vaguely money related. I am here with the one and only Anna Sale of Death, Sex and Money, which I feel like is a much more descriptive title reel, really.

0:44Anna Sale: It's descriptive, but maybe you could think of it as a more vast blank slate because you can throw even more into that big bucket of death, sex or money and or money.

0:53Felix Salmon: Yeah. And so I feel like where we oversexed is obviously money. But the reason I was super excited to talk to you is because one of the things we don't talk about on Slate Money that often, well, is A, personal finance and B, just emotions. I'm a cold fish, Anna.

1:21Anna Sale: oh i'm gonna make you squirm felix you're gonna make me squirm and yeah like we don't really have

1:27Felix Salmon: feelings on slate money we are we are rational robots and now i'm entering this this like jacuzzi with you full of emotions and floaty bits and you're gonna hold my hand and make sure that

1:42Anna Sale: i'm comfortable i am and you're gonna hold my hand because what i love about slate money is it i feel like it's a way to listen to understanding how I am fitting into systems, how the floaty feelings that I spend a lot of time thinking about, you help me kind of hook it on scaffolding to help me understand where I am and how I'm situated to other people in the economy. So I appreciate the expertise you're bringing.

2:05Felix Salmon: Thank you. Thank you. And so what we, what I thought we could talk about today is short people or specifically children, not adult short people like that adults. We can and leave them to the ground. Not fully grown people. People get very emotional about this whole subject of children. But one of the many emotions that is associated with children rather than childhood is this terrifying fear of, oh, my God, how expensive is this thing? And what am I letting myself in for? and if you read all of the literature about um you know bellyaching about declining birth rates across most of the planet inevitably somewhere in the you know two and a half thousand word article about korea or whatever is going to be a line about one of the reasons that people aren't having as many children is because either they can't afford to or they don't think they can afford to that that i don't i'm not entirely convinced this is true but it certainly feels true it has like truthiness that that children are this like expensive luxury do you think

3:25Anna Sale: they're an expensive luxury do i think they're an expensive luxury well i have a i have a visual prompt to show you what my life is like with two elementary age children since we are on youtube

3:35Felix Salmon: we can we can see the visual prompt this is this is a visual podcast people if you are just listening without watching you are missing out because anna's going to show me yeah i guess this is

3:49Anna Sale: like maybe a labored metaphor but i was like oh what do i want to wear for my conversation with slate money i got to class it up you know um and i thought so right now this is this is a necklace that I'm wearing from my dear husband. It's like the first, like a nice, beautiful little pearl. It's the first kind of nice piece of jewelry he ever bought me, which he bought me seven years into our marriage. And then, so that kind of gives you a sense of like, we were married for a long time before it felt like we could do something that was like special, special. And then there's Did he buy you an engagement ring?

4:25Anna Sale: He did not buy me an engagement ring. We were walking home from the park and decided, let's just get married. And so then we had to start saving our money for a wedding. So we didn't buy any jewels.

4:36Felix Salmon: Did you buy wedding bands?

4:39Anna Sale: We did. But you know what we did? Here's my wedding band, this gold band. This gold band, we melted down gold that was from different family members and we made each other. that is very romantic family we made each other wedding rings from gold that was already around okay my other necklace you get to choose my fashion this is a very blingy cost i thought

5:02Felix Salmon: this is looking to me okay you have to be watching this on youtube i i literally just got that is that is like elizabeth taylor quality necklace going on right i thought it looked kind

5:14Anna Sale: of regal like it looked made me look kind of like you know and so for the brit i brought something

5:19Felix Salmon: that reminded me of what i would wear if i were a queen it's giving cleopatra

5:26Anna Sale: okay so but but here is suz's nice but i want you to know this is like a costume jewelry piece that i got in south carolina and it's made of like probably very like shiny but cheap metal and

5:38Felix Salmon: don't don't let it touch your skin for too long otherwise your skin will turn green

5:45Anna Sale: So this is I just want what when I thought about, like, how is my life shaped by the fact that I'm raising two kids? It means that for, you know, I first became a mom at age 35. So at a time when maybe if you don't become a parent, you're beginning to if you've had a string of good breaks, maybe you're getting to the point in your career where you have some discretionary income. like that just got that just isn't isn't present when you have babies your children ate your income they did and then some um and so i think that to go back to your question about our children a luxury item um no i i don't think we should characterize them as that they're a little bit too smelly to be a luxury item yes um and i but they're like a yacht they take a lot of upkeep expensive upkeep but they um the two best days in the in your life are the day you buy your child and the day you sell your child wait hang on um but do i think that they are what how was money related to my feeling like i was ready to become a mom it wasn't so much i mean i did try to like spreadsheet out what a baby was going to cost.

7:06Anna Sale: I was like, what is a diaper? How many diapers a week? You know, I tried to do that. That didn't really give me an accurate number when I was pregnant. But I did really want to feel like I was standing on slightly solid ground as I took on this responsibility.

7:22Felix Salmon: Do you know anyone who has underestimated the cost of a kid?

7:28Anna Sale: Oh, I believe everyone probably underestimates. Particularly...

7:33Felix Salmon: sorry, I don't mean that. I mean, who has overestimated? Do you know anyone who's like had a kid and thought, oh, this is much cheaper than I thought it would be?

7:39Anna Sale: Cheaper. I think that there are families and ways to arrange your community of care where you don't have the sticker shock that a family does if you are a family where both caregivers, parents are working.

7:56Felix Salmon: Outsource all of the childcare to grandparents. This is a great way of saving money.

8:00Anna Sale: Yes. And if you're if you have the luck of healthy grandparents that have the energy to do it, that's a way to save money. In my case, what I found was from when I had my first child at 35, I had a second baby two and a half years later. And it was also a time when my husband and I were buying our house. We were trying to figure out how to afford a couch. We were having to pay first for child care. We did a nanny for the first baby. then the then when the second one came along we were there were a few years we were paying for preschool and infant care i mean it was insane it was an insane when did you buy the minivan well we let's see we did we did get a different car during the covet era where we were just like screw it we can't just have a sedan we need to have room for the dogs because we needed to be fully mobile as a family we felt like to escape wherever we were at any time you do have like the

8:57Felix Salmon: the quintessential nuclear family of like mom and dad and two kids and the dog and you need to fit the dogs and the kids and the parents all into one vehicle and it was a huge i think i'm still

9:12Anna Sale: recovering from the insane amount of financial anxiety that i had no i just did not know how how, I mean, it was really scary. It was really, really scary and overwhelming to have so many costs, new costs coming at me at once. So when, so like two years into kid one,

9:37Felix Salmon: are you like, how are you feeling about kid two at that point? Do you feel like you've learned something and yet you're just going ahead with it anyway?

9:45Anna Sale: Kid one, I love how I'm picturing these little like specimens in a lab. um kid too i mean the choice to do kid too was just a leap of faith and and that came not from any kind of economic calculation and instead from just a deep deep feeling that i wanted if i could to have have kids who were siblings i wanted to as one kid as someone who lives in manhattan i have long believed that the biggest flex you can do in manhattan is to have three kids oh yeah or sometimes you run into those families with four and i yeah i have a hard time even talking to those moms at elementary school pickup because i i just it's interesting i have this mix of how on earth it's like they're an alien and i have a very intense sense of envy like i wish that choice could have been available to us and it was money that made it not so

10:43Felix Salmon: so wow do you would you so so in a way it's true or at least truthy that if money was no object

10:52Anna Sale: you would have like four kids by now uh yes yeah yeah i would love to have a big family i love i love being a mom i love parenting i find my kids to add like immeasurable joy to my life and i feel

11:08Felix Salmon: so glad that i'm a parent i also this is so refreshing after however many years of co-hosting a podcast with emily peck it's just like oh my god you won't believe what they did this

11:22Anna Sale: well yes just tell emily i have such charming children who never yeah they're never annoying they never fight yeah i i guess i just want to make sure it's clear i live in a i live in the bay area i live in a like one of the most famously cheap place to live yes so i i definitely think that i i this is all a consequence of choices that i've made the kind of work that i went into the kind of place we decided to settle in um i think there's different realities in america and different sorts of communities but that's that's the case for us that too absolutely we we actually said over and over again when we would like daydream about a third kid well we couldn't one of us would have to quit our jobs.

12:03Anna Sale: And that's because of the cost of childcare. Like we could not, we could not do a third -

12:09Felix Salmon: I feel like this always puzzles me a little bit just because, I mean, I know childcare is expensive, but if you are a middle-class full-time earner, like you are earning more even after taxes than you are spending on childcare.

12:26Anna Sale: Yeah, but at what cost, right? Like there's a certain point where you're like, How much money is going out the door for child care? And then that adds a whole lot of logistical weight on everybody. If you're trying to figure out how to arrange child care, you're trying to figure out. And it also can make keeping a job that has a lot of obligations outside of the home difficult. Even when you have child care, there's all sorts of things that you need flexibility around. And I'm not sure. I think there are plenty of earners. I mean, childcare where I live to send my kid to preschool costs over$2 ,000 a month,$2 ,500 a month.

13:10Anna Sale: So it's a lot of money. And then if you have two kids in preschool, at a certain point, it's like, is it less? Should one of the parents just stay home and save that money and provide care that you don't have to pay for?

13:33Felix Salmon: so we've been talking a lot about kids as sort of financial drains things that are expensive and i can see from you know because i'm a bit older than you and i have friends who have kids in their 20s like it doesn't really end you know even when they leave home like you are still paying money to the kids it goes on a long time um obviously there are college expenses which are based into the college system where if you are applying to college and your parents are middle class and have some money you are a 100 expected to extract money from those parents like the parents are paying for that somehow so it's there's a there's a lot of upfront outlays involved for the first 25 years or so of having a child which is a long time and if you have more than one and if you have more than one child then it would be like 30 years and so i hate to even sort of i hesitate to even bring this up but is there not also an offset like as someone who doesn't have kids i'm like there are enormous financial and other benefits to having adult children when you are old.

14:58Felix Salmon: I mean, they are a little bit of a pension plan in that they might not be paying you money, but they will be doing other things that are financially very valuable to you.

15:09Anna Sale: I love that we have skipped from pre-K childcare all the way to when your child can be basically a pension plan.

15:19Felix Salmon: You know, exactly. Basically, when your child is 55 and you're 80, or in your case, 90, then at that point, your kid is doing all manner of things that are so valuable to you that it's almost impossible to replace with money. It's almost impossible to buy.

15:44Anna Sale: Yes. As somebody who is watching Dear Friends Care Give for Aging Parents, it is just all the tasks that it requires that would be just really hard to figure out how to find someone to pay them. Whether it's coordinating medical appointments or just helping with tech questions and new devices come into the household, all these sorts of things that adult children show up for. And really, I think, add an incredible sense of a cushion as age, if you have the privilege of age.

16:27Felix Salmon: Preventing your parent from just getting scammed by pig butchering text messages.

16:35Anna Sale: Yes. I actually think that the scam, don't reply to that text and don't answer that phone call.

16:41Felix Salmon: And no, you don't need to sign up for that book club and give them your credit card.

16:46Anna Sale: That is a very important role of an adult child. Yes, I think that that is something, a measure of maybe, maybe how I would put it is, you know, for me, when I think about what I am earning money for since I became a parent, it's, it's just kind of like I'm earning money to make sure we're stable. I'm earning money to, you know, there's a little bit of money to share with with charitable gifts and things like that. But for the most part, it is I am earning money to set up my kids to launch into adulthood and anything extra. I'm hoping it's going to allow them to navigate and maneuver through whatever the economy is like in America in the 2030s and 2040s.

17:32I need to ask you this kind of loaded and rude question.

17:38Felix Salmon: Oh, do it. But like, are you, are you like moving towards that cliche point where you are living vicariously through your kids?

17:48Anna Sale: Oh, I think so. I wouldn't say it like that. It's not like I look at my kids and I'm like, I really hope you become the stadium selling out country star that I wish I could have been. That's like the alternate life path, what I think about. I don't think of it that way. But I think of it like, it's almost like I feel really clear that I'm part of a flow of ancestors, right? Like, that's kind of how I think of it. Like, it is my responsibility during these adulthood years of mine to try to steward, you know, kind of like, you know, some of its resources, and some of its like, who are the who are we as citizens and what are our values and how do we participate in our community and

18:35Felix Salmon: how am i instilling this is definitely you know part of the rhetoric that we're seeing quite a lot of from the likes of jd vance and elon musk which is basically your job on this planet is to get the human race to continue and like have go out there and have babies and like support humanity that way because you know people like felix hamley don't have any babies they're like literally just mooching off the planet and giving nothing back did you hear that when i said what i thought about no okay no i mean well i mean so well yes and no like so i feel like there is a narrow version of that which is less to do with humanity and like you know existential questions around with a humanity but it's still there in terms of like i come from an infinitely long line of people you know my parents grandparents great great great great great great great great great grandparents there are millions of them and i don't want to be the end of that line and i want to continue that tradition and so it maybe is more directly genealogical rather than

19:51Anna Sale: like a species-based thing but they are related yeah yeah and for you if i may ask was your choice

20:00Felix Salmon: not to become a parent intentional yeah okay because because i mean yeah i partly it was selfish as someone who you know lives in manhattan and likes spending money on food and art and you know all of the other myriad travel all of these things that one spends money on um not only is there a direct cost to having children that then reduces your disposable income to spend money on anything else but yeah i think you put it right that you're all of your priorities wind up changing and i was actually quite happy with my

20:42Anna Sale: priorities yeah and i think when i look at my childless friends i think it's kind of cool what you get to do that i have not gotten to do when when you do have more discretionary income as a grown-up you can find ways of creatively expressing and exploring yeah it's not it's not just money

21:01Felix Salmon: it's time you know there's like so i remember we were doing a series of travel episodes on slate money and both of my co-hosts on sleep money uh parents and they mentioned that like basically neither of them had left the country in over a decade and i'm like that's wild like i don't think i've ever gone more than a few months without you know leaving whatever country i'm living in you

21:32Anna Sale: know it's just like it's just part of my life yeah it would feel very odd to me to be like oh

21:37Felix Salmon: oh, yeah, I've just been living in the United States for the past 10 years and haven't seen any other bit of the planet.

21:44Anna Sale: Well, not just seen, but had like relational encounters. So there's like a good to that as well. Like you are doing something for our society by having relationships with people in other countries.

21:57Felix Salmon: Plus I'm an immigrant. So, you know, I have, you know, obviously more direct connection to other countries. But yeah.

22:05Anna Sale: Do you feel like you don't have a living and breathing pension plan in children as you look ahead to older adulthood? I totally do.

22:18Felix Salmon: I'm placing no faith in my nieces and nephews to be able to look after me when I'm old and doddery. And I'm not so delusional as to believe that I will be entirely compass mentis for my entire life. Like at some point, I am going to need people to look after me. And I have no idea who those people are going to be. Do you think maybe like Sam Altman's robot will be able to do that for me?

22:52Anna Sale: I don't think so. I don't think chatbots can do caregiving.

22:57Felix Salmon: Right.

22:58Anna Sale: You know, maybe maybe the chatbot can help you figure out how to get that weird thing off your phone that you don't know where it came from.

23:04Felix Salmon: But when it comes to care, the most important thing that adults do when they're looking after their parents is saying no, you know, and the chatbots are very bad at saying no. uh the chat but this is the problem with all the people who are using chatbots as therapy is that you know i'm i'm i'm on there and chat gpt saying i'm not crazy thinking that all of these like voices are talking to me right and the chatbot is like no you're not crazy this is perfectly sensible because they their job is to sort of just reinforce that's how they that's how they communicate and so yeah if i'm like this book club is awesome right the chatbot is going to be like yeah give them your credit card number well and i'm not sure the most important thing a caregiver

23:50Anna Sale: does is say no i think the most important thing a caregiver does is like gives you an arm to hold

23:55Felix Salmon: on to when you're getting out of the car that's also that's also very useful yes

24:02Anna Sale: can i ask you when i think about ai and my kids and it's something i'm thinking about a lot a lot a lot um just sort of the economy that we're careening towards and the job market i don't It just feels so like I just it seems like I don't understand what world I'm raising them to enter into. Do you think this is a slate money expert question? Like part of I think the reason why people like J.D. Vance talk about procreation as some kind of patriotic duty. It's because the workforce needs workers and these are you know, this is how we're going to have economic growth. It tends to be like an economic theory along with the idea that that's the way to live.

24:47Felix Salmon: I mean, the best way to raise GDP per capita is to just cut the number of capitals, right? Boom. But yeah, that doesn't work. That doesn't scale very well.

24:56Anna Sale: Cut the number of capitals. Is that true? Because when I think about how will social security work?

25:04Felix Salmon: Exactly. If you look at Japan, that's a really good example of what happens when you have a shrinking population. and gdp per capita is doing quite well in japan because population is shrinking but you're absolutely right the number of working adults who are supporting the elderly is just like that ratio is getting smaller and smaller and eventually you wind up with the system where you know on some level as a society you face the same issue that i'm facing as a childless individual like i don't have enough children to support me because my number of children to support me is zero. But then as a society, you just don't have enough working age adults to support the number of retired adults that exist.

25:48Felix Salmon: And then what do you do? Historically, in rich society is the argument. The answer has always been, or it's going to have to be some form of immigration. But again, that doesn't scale. Once we reach that point in China, which we're going to reach very quickly, if we're not already there, there's not enough countries on the planet for China to import all of the people it needs to look after its elderly population boom.

26:17Anna Sale: And does the idea of working age adults being an important economic indicator, economic predictor, that presumes that those working age adults have the opportunity to have a wage earning job?

26:30Felix Salmon: Right. I mean, yeah, technically speaking, the important thing is like working adults rather than working age adults. But you kind of assume that to a first approximation, those two numbers are pretty highly correlated.

26:44Anna Sale: And do you think that's, I should continue to assume that in an AI future?

26:48Felix Salmon: Now you're asking me to like predict the AI future. You know, that has always been the case for, you know, the past thousand years. And so my general heuristic being a good Bayesian is that if it's been true for the past thousand years, it's probably going to be true for the next 70 years. but it is possible that some like you know singularity will happen and then we'll all

27:13Anna Sale: just wind up being eaten by skynet can i ask you when you think about what you're making money for beyond pleasure like things to do hobbies and things like anything is there anything beyond pleasure i guess i think like as we look at like 70 years from now or a thousand years from now Do you think not having kids, like, do you think of a sort of like inheritance of what comes after you of that, that of what you want your money to do?

27:41Felix Salmon: so yeah that i mean i think there's an interesting

27:48Felix Salmon: subtext there which is like do i consider myself to be the legacy of my grandparents and my great-grandparents my great-great-grandparents all doing this very selfless thing which is like having kids and then at the end of that long line of people having kids for the sake of future generations. I am now that future generation. And what am I doing? I'm spending it on foie gras at a Manhattan restaurant. And what the hell is the point?

28:19Anna Sale: I'm just writtering it all away. That's not very self-compassionate.

28:27Felix Salmon: I do think there are ways in which I am trying to make the world a better place. and I certainly give away a bunch of money and try to be mindful of how I'm spending money. But at the same time, I'm not going to pretend that there isn't a bunch of stuff that is just purely selfish. You know, I'm like, I'm enjoying going to this opera. So I'm going to spend hundreds of dollars on opera tickets. Well,

28:56Anna Sale: no, but then you're creating, you're, you're supporting an arts community that otherwise.

29:02Felix Salmon: It is true. I do. Yeah, I mean, I live in an art-filled apartment, and all of the art that I have bought has been bought from the artist. And I am supporting those artists by buying that art. I'm not going out to auction houses and buying it from rich people who are selling art. I'm buying it from people who make money by selling art. And I think that is an important part of supporting that community, for sure. And that is something, on some level, it is a zero-sum game. I get to go out and buy paintings because I don't have to buy diapers.

29:38Anna Sale: It's true. I would love to figure out what kind of art I might buy if I had more of an art budget. And that's just something that is either I have to wait for or is just not going to be in the cards for me. Yeah. So I hope you invite people to your place to show off your beautiful art.

29:58Felix Salmon: We do. And I'll tell you one thing, which is totally off topic, but I will mention it just because I think it's one of the things which people don't do enough, which is that every time we buy an art, we have a dinner party for the artist. And so we invite them over and we ask them who they would like to invite and they get to invite a few other people and we all have a dinner and it's all in honor of the artist and we have the art above the dinner table. and yeah and it feels love it's a great way of just saying you know thank you

30:32Anna Sale: well i i would argue that that's part of like a kind of this is gonna sound lofty but like an inheritance of what you're doing because you spent that money on that art you're inviting that artist into your home you're connecting who they know with people you know and it's creating a network that just is bigger than if you hadn't done anything to begin with that's gonna perhaps

30:53Felix Salmon: you know change that artist work or career in some way that's that's good like i i don't know

30:59Anna Sale: i think that that's a when i think of like what we're all doing this for it's like relational

31:05Felix Salmon: care yeah and so i have a bunch of relationships i have a bunch of friends and you know i'm not friends with my kids friends parents because i don't have any kids friends who have parents but that doesn't mean like it's amazing how the degree to which people with kids wind up hanging out with their kids friends parents it is quite astonishing yes i know we sort of disappear

31:34Anna Sale: um from our friend friendships with people without kids to our detriment um and also we disappear from our friendships with our with people who do have kids because there's just less capacity i do

31:44Felix Salmon: also like weirdly this is this is part of why um up until very recently queer americans have kind of been invisible because they tended not to have kids and so like the straight breeder majority would like just not see them because they weren't their kids trans parents but now that your kids friends parents are much more likely to be gay suddenly that is a way for the whole gay you know universe to start becoming much more incorporated into quotidian family life and i think that's

32:22Anna Sale: wonderful well and maybe when they were invisible to the breeders as you call us they were busy making culture because they had time like they were the vanguard of making culture for us yeah

32:33Felix Salmon: like what's gonna have what's gonna happen to broadway when all of the gays have kids man

32:41Anna Sale: that's the root of the crisis the economic crisis that is that is too many families

32:47Felix Salmon: yeah come on gay stop having kids we need you to support the culture instead

32:55Anna Sale: well i i think i don't i don't know where else we could go from there that's that i think we're

33:02Felix Salmon: just going to leave it there um we are going to have two more episodes of this little mini series and i am very hopeful that we're going to be able to rope in my financial advisor to talk a little bit about how she just deals emotionally with um people with money because this is just a deep deep well of potential conversation but for the time being congratulations to everyone who doesn't have goods even more congratulations to everyone who does have kids you're amazing and we will be back with even more slate money and death sex money thank you felix it was a pleasure to be with you and yeah and thank you also i should thank also shana roth and jessamine molly and the whole slate team because we are on youtube people

33:53Anna Sale: this is like we are we have made the lead you need to see my beautiful costume jewelry just

33:59Felix Salmon: Just take it off once we finish recording, because otherwise you're going to have green skin.