Wyoming parents are paying 47% more to raise their young children than they did two years ago. It’s the biggest increase of any state, according to a new report from the financial service company Lending Tree.
Wyomingites pay almost $293,000 over the 18 years of raising their children, the sixth highest in the U.S.
“That is not a list that you wanna be on the top of,” said Matt Schulz, a consumer finance analyst with the company. Lending Tree compared costs of people who have kids to those who don’t, using U.S. Census Bureau data and other resources.
Schulz said they looked at the price tag on everything from groceries to daycare to health insurance. Wyoming’s biggest rise was in the cost of rent and transportation.
“A lot of Wyoming is what you call a childcare desert,” Schulz said. “There's a good chance that you're gonna have to drive a pretty good ways to find childcare. And that's a really, really difficult thing.”
He said inflation has brought up the cost of food for families as well.
“ [Food is] not like it's something you can cancel like a Netflix subscription. You’ve got to figure that out and you’ve got to sacrifice in your budget and make some decisions. That's a situation that a lot of people are facing,” Schulz said.
He said rising costs on goods like children’s clothes and nursery equipment could increase the burden.
“ It stands to rise further if these tariffs stay in place,” he said. “What I suggest is that if you're somebody who has a budget and you haven't looked at it in the last little while, it's probably a good idea to reassess some things. Because a lot of the assumptions that you might have made about what things cost just may not be valid anymore.”
Schulz also recommends taking control of what you do have power to change, like buying used clothes for children instead of new, putting more money aside in a high yield savings account and addressing debt accumulation.
”One of the things that you can do is to try and pay down that high interest credit card debt to the degree that you can with a 0% balance transfer card or a personal loan, things like that,” Schultz said. “If you're trying to raise a kid and anticipate all of the emergencies and quirky stuff that happens as a parent, having that emergency fund is so important.”
