If you didn’t know already, babies are money-eating monsters. As discussed in the previous article, the cost of raising a single child from birth through high school is a quarter million dollars.

But that’s just the direct costs.

Let’s look not only at those direct costs, but also the opportunity cost of child rearing.

A United States government survey listed the annual costs of raising a child as such:

The total cost is $247,150. If instead you had invested that money into a Roth IRA mutual fund with an average return of 10%, at the end of 18 years you would have $683,000. The real cost of raising a child is nearly seven tenths of a million dollars.

For two kids, the total cost is $494,000, and the lost opportunity cost is 1.3 million dollars. Three children cost $741,000 with a lost opportunity of 2 million dollars at the end of 18 years.

While children can bring joy into your life, you need to seriously consider the financial implications of having one before you do.

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(If you are interested in the details of these calculations, you can click here to see the spreadsheet.)

The world recently crossed a demographic threshold: as of mid 2008 more than 50% of the world’s population lives in cities. Despite the Malthusian predictions of the 70s, the population of industrialized nations is decreasing — and the cities are the cause. Cities act as population sinkholes for one simple reason: babies are expensive.

In the city potential parents have a choice to make: would you rather have a child or a million dollars— And the time to enjoy it? While babies are an asset in rural areas, they are an enormous liability in the cities.

When my wife and I started to plan our long-term financial goals, we calculated the earliest possible retirement age if we really focused and lived like spartans. Crunching the numbers we came up with a low boundary of 45 years old. Pretty good, we thought.

My wife, beautiful intelligent woman that she is, looked at the amount necessary to save annually and said to me: “This spreadsheet is the best reason I’ve ever seen not to have a baby.”

The remark about babies costing a million dollars isn’t far off. According to a study done in the 1990s by the US government raising a child from 0 to 18 costs between $170,000 and $250,000. Just one! That’s excluding sending the precious darling to college. And that’s data from nearly two decades ago.

While there may be good reasons to have a baby, your finances are not one of them. So, before you and the little lady decide she no longer needs to take that little pill every night, ask yourself: a child or a million dollars?