How Rich Could You Be If You Bought '90s Apple Stock Instead of Having Kids?

Kids are expensive. Everyone knows that. But it’s hard to visualize just how much money you spend while raising those precious babies to adulthood. To give you the bleak outlook, try out WhatIfIBoughtAppleInstead.com, a calculator that compares how much raising a child costs versus how much money you could have if you put that money into Apple stock instead.

For instance, I was born in 1990. Using cost data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Yahoo Finance, the calculator estimates that even without the cost of college, 18 years of raising me probably cost my parents somewhere around $419,000. (Sorry, guys.) Instead, they could have bought 193,283 Apple shares, and they’d be $21.1 million richer. This is a whole new way to feel guilty about not calling your parents enough, particularly if you were born in the days before Apple became the world’s biggest company.

Life is a little more complicated than this kind of simple calculator can handle, so these aren't cut-and-dry figures. Maybe my parents would actually only be $20 million richer if they replaced me with an investment in Steve Jobs. Either way—parental love: so valuable.

Calculate the cost of your own birth or the birth of your own children here.

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