Sheila’s Story: What I could never quite understand was people with even less money than us having more than one child

Not having children is a decision my husband and I made early on in our relationship. Neither of us has ever felt any deep longing for children and being busy with our respective jobs meant that our life was already full. Now, both in our 50s, we are in no doubt that it was the right decision for us. We both took early retirement a couple of years ago and have been mortgage free for some 5 years.

It is true that we have had careers that paid well. However, we also know couples our age who have very well paid jobs, yet unlike us, are unlikely to be mortgage free until at least their 60s, and of course retiring early is not something they can afford. What do those couples all have in common? You guessed it. They are all parents. Children as my husband and I always say, make you poor. Simple as that. They are great if you have lots of money like some of those rich people with second homes. But if you are just the normal middle class professional as we were, having children is bound to drastically impact on your finances.

What I could never quite understand was people with far less money than us having more than one child. Why? And then the annoying thing was that, the same people would spend their times complaining about how difficult their lives were. It beggars belief that they couldn’t see that having more children than they could afford, was the reason why they were struggling financially. By all means, people are free to have as many children as they like, but I for one wished they could spare us the sob stories about their financial woes.

For me, and my husband feels exactly the same, life is all about personal responsibility. Everything we do has consequences. Unless you have a great deal of money, know that having children is going to impact negatively on your finances, and by extension your overall well-being.

Now that we are retired, we have lots of time on our hands to do all the things that we planned on doing all these years ago. We go on at least 3 foreign holidays a year and last year we managed 4! How great that we can now do as we please without having to worry about work.

We have our old age all planned out. We want to stay in our house for the rest of our lives and have made provisions for that. So long as you have the means, there is nothing stopping you having the life you want.

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