Kids’ Sports Have Become CRAZY Expensive

When extracurriculars compete with your retirement savings, it’s time to revisit the budget. Bruce Sellery shares a framework for smarter spending.

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The elephant in the room to me, for a lot of people in their thirties and forties are their kids sports and extracurricular activities. So I’m getting these spending summaries sent to me. My kids grew up playing sports. My son was a good athlete. You’re looking at all this going, okay, it was expensive when these guys were young. This is nutty now.

It is nutty.

Is that not put behind an eight ball?

It is nutty. And so what the model I apply is called the priority pyramid, right? So it’s a riff on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. And I came up with it because people were so overwhelmed with all the things we were talking to them about. So the base level of the pyramid is cash flow, debt reduction, savings, all that stuff. At the level of cash flow, the average family needs to look at it and say what’s coming in and what’s going out.

And it is not optional in my view, and probably yours, but it’s not optional to save for retirement or to save for an emergency fund or to save for a kid’s education. None of that’s optional. So all that’s then in your monthly cash flow and you’ve got discretionary spending. And that discretionary spending then goes to, you know, clothes outside of a winter jacket.

Uber Eats. Kids sports, all those sorts of things. And every family has to make those judgements. But I want them to make those judgements with their eyes wide open. And when you say it’s important for my kid to play rep hockey, it doesn’t come from retirement savings, it comes from, oh, well I guess I’m gonna have to work an overtime shift twice a month.

Right? Like, that’s what I’m gonna have to do. Amazing. You should totally do that. That’s great. Eyes wide open. Here’s what our priorities are and here’s how we’re going to fund them.

You know what’s crazy though is that when I was, uh, raising kids, so let’s say 25 years ago, my son’s playing high level sports. We could make sacrifices in one area, all the families, and still support, even though it was expensive we could get through without dipping into retirement savings efforts, et cetera.

Now, even if you make compromises elsewhere with discretionary spending. You don’t take holidays. You work the extra shift, to your point, it’s so crazy on the AAA level especially, or on dance or on cheerleading.

Yeah.

They can’t get through it without compromising their retirement savings, which means maybe we shouldn’t be doing this. Like how did all of this stuff become so expensive?

I think sure there’s inflation, but I would go back to expectation inflation. So my kid danced. Uh, why do we need new costumes every single time? Why does at the mid-level synchronize swimming require so much travel? Like what are the kinds of things that we could really think about how to make this work for more people and in this holistic view of our lives.

We’re understating the problem. When you actually see the spending summaries from people who chronicle it well, meaning they take care of the gas, the hotels, the hockey sticks, the bats, the dance outfits, etc.

It is absolutely crazy.