VENTURA, CA — Local woman Sarah Carter, whose ancestors once raised 11 kids in a 2-bedroom house, recently told her friends she thought having kids these days was just too expensive.
"I mean, it's just way too expensive to raise a family in today's economy," Carter told friends. "I could never afford a kid because then I'd have to buy a brand-new $70,000 car to put them in and a million-dollar house to raise them in and then there's the designer clothes they'd need to wear and can you even imagine what our Whole Foods bill would look like!?"
Carter remembers hearing stories about her own great-grandparents raising eleven kids in a tiny house in the country but says times have changed. "Yeah, but they paid like, what, 5-grand for that house?"
After someone pointed out that $5,000 dollars back then has a purchasing power of $178,000 in today's currency and her grandfather made about $1,000 a year and the family didn't buy brand new cars or wear expensive clothes and they made or grew most of their own food and didn't take European vacations or eat out at restaurants four times a month or have a house full of new furniture, Carter brushed it off and said "Times are different now. If I had kids and they weren't wearing trendy clothes, what would my Instagram followers think?"
At publishing time, Carter told her husband the only way they could afford kids was if they both worked so they could put their kids in daycare they both would have to work full-time to afford.
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