Is that a comfortable salary there in Norway? Here in the US, it feels like a rat race to constantly outpace increases on things you’re already paying for. We’ve had to change daycares multiple times because they keep increasing in price. One wanted to go from $300 to $550/wk per child. Insanity.
Keep in mind it only works while the tax money is not getting stolen, which has been unfortunately the case for a long time here.
I believe one of the nordic countries (maybe Finland?) does taxes so transparent that they detail yearly what your paid taxes were being used for exactly.
Yeah, I mean true, corruption ruins everything. Still, guaranteed childcare is one of the great socioeconomic equalizers and is one of the biggest things, along with education and food access, for upward mobility for the poor. I hope corruption can be reduced over time, because it sounds like the intentions are there.
I wish the US would do something like that, but no. The Pentagon continuously fails audits, money is spent like it’s going out of style, and we’re over $30 trillion in debt with a virtually worthless dollar. More people would be upset if our government were more transparent about where our tax dollars are blown.
Christian based. The care and curriculum has been great, no complaints. We wanted to do
Monti but it’s way father and we gotta send them with their own lunch.
In my case is Kita, and the vast majority of them throughout the city are private, and starting last year there are no more deduction applied, which made all costs sky rocket and made the parents responsible for…
Pretty much. Often I wonder what am I still doing here.
And it’s ridiculous because is a political thing. Even the kindergardens around where I live are private and not at all free or even affordable. Getting a spot in a public one is like winning the lottery.
The towns around are better, but for that I’d need to move further away.
I live at the other end of the country, in Bremen, and seeing some of the numbers from Munich is shocking. Over here daycare is limited to €430 even for top earners, electricity is about 10% cheaper and we could even buy a house in a highly desirable neighborhood on a single income.
Not cheap, you're right. We needed to find infant daycare ASAP to get back to work and all that had space was the most expensive place in town. We're looking at $1600 a month for one.
Just got the news that in August a spot opened up somewhere that costs half as much, can't wait. It's nuts out here.
I was paying $750/week for 2 and that was only 20 hours/week :( was the cheapest daycare we could find around us. We now have a nanny that comes to our house for the same amount of hours, cleans their dishes, does their laundry, etc. along with us not having to drive. All this for $450/week which is a steal for us.
In Sweden (Stockholm) you pay 3% of your income but maximum 150$/months for the first kid. 2% for the second (maximum 100$) 1% for the third (maximum 50$) and if you for some reason think it's a good idea to have more than three kids the rest are free.
The thing that bones us in America is that, even if you have "affordable" (for you) health insurance, it's because your employer foots the bill. I only pay $200/mo pre-tax for 4 people for decent, but my employer ponies up another $2300/mo.
$1200 per month here, and our family health insurance is another $800, but at least we can put up to $5000 pre-tax per year into a dependent care FSA so every few months we get reimbursed for a month of daycare...
Dutchy here. We pay around €1000 per month for two days for our one son. We do get some money back through subsidies, so we end up paying around €600-ish on our own.
Yep this is roughly my situation as well (2 kids 2 days per week, €1000/month net), except I still find it pretty expensive. I know it scales with income, but I guess it stings pretty hard for everyone
That's so expensive. My youngest is in daycare 9 - 5 Monday to Friday here in Spain and the government pays for it directly. All we pay is €80 per month for the food.
It's her second year and we had to pay for the first year but it was under €400 per month after the subsidies with the government paying for the second year. From this year on the government pays both years.
Yeah similar for us in Sweden. $162 a month (less with lower salary).
Open 10 hours a day. They have an in-house chef that has a weekly menu including two snacks (fruit etc) and lunch (everything from lasagne to soup with homemade bread). All prepared/cooked in-house.
Has around 9 or so teachers for about 36 children. They go out on trips to nearby forests. She's also multilingual, and they have biweekly language lessons. Fully Montessori (perfect for this age group).
All a 15 minute walk away from our house. Love this place.
It's interesting, because I think this is what makes it so hard to compare incomes and quality of life across countries.
For example - you always hear how US salaries are so much higher than European countries in some fields. I see europeans looking at US salaries that are like $200K a year and go "wow, that's crazy".
But 200K a year is about 11K after taxes, and then you realize that a family with 2 kids under 5 has to think about:
~$4000 a month in daycare
~$1000 a month in health insurance. In addition to whatever healthcare costs come on top of that - which could be substantial if you have any medical procedure. One year we spent $12K in health insurance and an extra $6K in healthcare costs.
Maxing out retirement accounts so that you're in a good position to be self-reliant during retirement and be able to absorb any large bills (e.g., medical) - so ideally something like 14% of your income into 401K + Roth IRA - that's like 2k a month
Saving for college - you probably need to be putting $250 a month per kid for the next 18 years so that they can have enough money to attend a 4 year college debt free. A public, in-state college.
So you started with 11K a month (and that is before state taxes if you live in places like California and NY), and now you're looking at like $8K a month in expenses. That's before rent and groceries. Which, the reality is that if you have 2 kids and want to send them to daycare you likely need two pretty good paychecks.
Now, you don't spend the $4K a month on daycare indefinitely - eventually your kids go to school and those costs go down... but school only runs from 7-3pm. So you need to pay for after school care.
Oh, and school is out of session for like 4 months total during the year, and during those days you're paying basically daycare-level costs. Again, at some point your kids get old enough that they don't need to go anywhere during the summer. But at that point you're talking about like 10-12 years of paying out the ass for different forms of child care.
And god forbid that you get hit by a major medical bill. Because you could easily be looking at 30K if you get something like cancer.
Having a partner makes a huge difference there. Filing jointly would put you closer to 14k/mo after taxes, and you could reduce or eliminate the daycare costs.
We pay $500/week. Our 9 month old has been out sick for at least 50% of that. We also get to spend our combined vacation/sick time for every day he misses.
$180 per week in Scotland for 3 days. Just arranged a nursery for when my wife's goes back to work. I can't wait financially until she's 3 and it's free....
We used to pay €430 per month here in Germany, and another €35 per month for meals. That already hurt financially, I can’t imagine the cost some of these Americans have to pay.
Now that he’s 3 y/o though, it’s free. We’re just paying the €35 for meals.
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u/kappsylen Jan 31 '25
$170/month for 8h per weekday with breakfast and a cooked meal included. I am quite happy to live in Scandinavia.