When a couple make plans to start a family, they are required to consider many components of their lives, and many of those components have a financial angle.

The focus of Spectrem’s new study Parenting and Financial Decisions is the financial considerations future parents need to make prior to starting a family, as well as the way investors feel about the financial decisions they have made during the process of raising a child or children.

Two of the most important areas that future parents need to consider before staring a family is where they are going to live and where they are gong to work.

Here are some key facts determined in the Spectrem study:

HOME OWNERSHIP

Future parents must determine if they are going to raise their family in the house they are living in before the child comes along. Many couples without children live in apartments, townhouses or condos, and must consider whether they are going to buy a home in anticipation of starting a family.

According to Parenting and Financial Decisions, 58 percent of affluent parents did buy a home prior to having children. Considering the financial impact home ownership and mortgage liability can have on a household financial picture, buying the home first seems like a prudent decision.

Twenty percent of investors purchased a home after having their first child and directly because of the presence of the new member of the family. Another 14 percent purchased a home after having their first child, but claim it was not for family purposes.

Advisors working with clients who have not yet started a family need to assist those clients in considering all of the financial factors that go into buying a home as they parallel the financial factors that go into starting a family.

Eight percent of investors without children said they have not yet started a family because they want to buy a home first.

RELOCATING

For some investors, the concept of relocating as a result of intentions to start a family can be described simply as moving from the city to the suburbs. For others, relocation comes as a result of the desire to improve their employment situation, which will be discussed below.

Among investors who do not yet have children, 28 percent said it was their intention to relocate after having children to better meet the needs of the family. That could include educational opportunities, recreational concerns, or moving to a less expensive community.

Segmented by gender, 35 percent of males and 28 percent of females said relocating mattered to them prior to having children.

EMPLOYMENT

Twenty-six percent of investors without children said they plan to change employment after having children. That is very close to the 28 percent who said they plan to relocate; those two decisions are probably equivalent for many investors.

Changing employment for the purposes of starting a family could include a desire for a higher salary, but could also include working for a firm with better options related to work-life balance issues which come up in parenting.

 

 

©2019 Spectrem Group

Keywords: real estate, home ownership, investors, advisors, employment, Spectrem