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.)

Would you pay $1,000 for something that you could get — of equal quality — for $1? If you use disposable batteries, that’s exactly what you’re doing.

The electricity you get from a disposable battery, according to Eric Giler, is thousands of times more expensive per kilowatt-hour than the electricity you get from the wall. Rechargeable batteries make an enormous amount of economic sense — the cost of electricity from your house to charge them is so small, it might as well be free.

When I bought my first digital camera, I learned just how expensive disposable batteries can be. After discovering, with horror, that my new camera chewed through four AA batteries in a day of active photographing, I knew I couldn’t justify $8.00 a pop for a new clip of batteries anymore.

After researching on the web, I settled on the eneloop brand of rechargeable batteries. Since then, I’ve added many more battery-hungry devices to my life and I became curious as to how much money the rechargeables were saving me.

Here are the main devices I use that require batteries:

• Two digital cameras
• One LED flashlight
• One Bluetooth keyboard
• One Bluetooth mouse
• One GPS tracker
• One timer

According to Amazon.com, the average price for a single AA battery is $0.97 and a AAA battery is $0.86.

I estimated the number of times per year that I change the batteries on each device and multiplied that by the number of batteries per device and the cost per battery. You can see the results in the spreadsheet below:

The total yearly savings is $317.49. According to the everything I own project I bought 14 AA’s, 8 AAA’s and two chargers for a total cost of $90.65.

While $90.65 sounds like a lot, it isn’t when you do the cost saving calculation and see that it pays for itself in three and a half months. Assuming I live for fifty more years, I’m looking at a lifetime saving of $15,000.

If you haven’t switched to using rechargeable batteries already, you should. Your wallet will thank you.

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Header photograph by pasukaru76

The median household in the United States spends 19% of their budget on transportation. However, in the suburbs, that cost can rise to more than 40% of the budget. Suddenly, the suburbs don’t look so cheap — living closer to the city center cuts your transportation costs but housing is more expensive. How does one find the cheapest overall cost of living? Fortunately, someone has made a map showing the total cost of living. From the blog post:

This map combines both housing and transportation costs. The result is maybe a bit surprising. In-city areas tend to look pretty good, while far-flung suburbs — where you get a lot of square footage (and lawnage) for your money — don’t look so good at all. It makes a little clearer the tradeoff between floor space and travel costs, which tend to be higher than buyers imagine.

This will be quite useful for when my wife and I move back to The States. Currently living in a big city with fantastic public transportation, it’s easy to forget how much cars cost.

[Click here to read ‘The True Cost of Suburban Housing’]

[Click here to see the maps]

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Header photograph by ulybug

Story via WorldChanging.com

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