This Is the Least Expensive Nation in Which to Raise a Family

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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This Is the Least Expensive Nation in Which to Raise a Family

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The costs to raise a family vary from nation to nation, as do costs for everything from food to education and transportation. As would be expected, the cost to raise a family in a highly developed nation is much more expensive than in a country where incomes and the cost of living are much lower. However, ever on a relative basis, the expenses needed to cover the costs of over a decade of providing for the needs of children may be the largest expense a family has.

Online toy seller PoundToy used data sourced from cost-of-living database Numbeo to estimate the annual cost of raising a young family in 63 nations. The costs include rent, utilities, preschool education, broadband internet and other living expenses. From this list, 24/7 Wall St. chose the least expensive one.

While it may be cheap to raise a family in poor, developing countries because of low costs of living, families in these countries also seldom have access to public resources, as well as little to no chance of economic mobility. In addition, health care outcomes tend to be poor in these nations, with shorter life expectancy and greater maternal and child mortality rates.

Across the countries we looked at, the annual cost of raising a family ranges from about $21,000 to $285,000. A rich European city-state like Monaco has astronomically high costs but a small population of affluent households that can afford them. On the other hand, an emerging-market country like Slovenia offers much lower family-raising costs but also lower wages and benefits to working families. It may seem cheap to raise a family in a certain country, but it is not cheap to the families that live there.
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The country with the lowest costs to raise a family is Turkey, where the total annual cost is $21,303.

Click here to all the least expensive countries to raise a family in.
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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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