As I stated in a previous post, if you wait until you think you can afford kids, you'll probably never have any.

Well, that's not necessarily true, at least in our situation. We have 3 empty bedrooms, and our budget has an extra 2k per month that's not spoken for in our retirement plan, so affording them isn't necessarily the issue, just assuming a single child won't cost an extra 2k every month.

If finances are your primary goal, you probably shouldn't have kids, but then you would miss grandchildren, and they are certainly special.

Certainly not our primary goal, but I would like to think that I can balance all of our goals. If kids came with annuities to pay for every one of their costs and they added 3 years onto our lifespan for each child, it's possible we'd have 4 or 5 of them. However, our goals in life include both raising children, and having a rewarding retirement. So I'm budgeting for a child (or possibly two), and making plans for retirement as well. We will put off our retirement in order to have the child if needed, but I don't see any reason so far that it's necessary. I might need to cancel our pinball machine budget, but golly, if that's the worst thing then I'm pretty happy.