I'm working with a new client, a young couple that don't have kids yet but plan to start a family next year and have a second child sometime after that. I don't see any way to account for this, am I missing something? Perhaps the lower table on the children tab should have a start date for pre-college expenses (starting the year the child is born)?
Expanding the Children tab's scope to future kids, pre-college and maybe even scenarios makes good sense.
As a workaround, I would consider using the Expenses>Miscellaneous tab to account for these. Provides for dates, scenario and COLA parameters. Ref. Page 109 in the user manual and the image attached. Have you explored this option?
Regards.
For now I'm working around by putting the anticipated years of birth through last year of high school in the miscellaneous expenses at $14,000 per year for each child (us average of cost of children is $12k-$14k, higher when they're babies) and then filling out the college info under the Children tab.
Still doesn't work correctly though, as they'll be dependents for tax purposes for those childhood years.
@hines202 Hi Bill, you're not missing anything; the model simply doesn't support the addition of kids in the future. I think this would be a good feature for me to add but the focus so far has been on older couples. I'm putting this on the list for strong consideration for the 2023 model.
Stuart
