What is a life worth? Is it even possible to put a price tag on the cost of living a long,
healthy life? The answer is yes, and life is more expensive than you can possibly imagine.
From birth until death, this is how much your life will cost.
It is expensive to be born. But in some cases, it is just as costly to be conceived.
More and more couples are turning to in vitro fertilization and other methods as
an option to get pregnant. Unfortunately, insurance rarely covers these treatments,
and they often come with a hefty price tag.
Depending on the circumstances, if you were conceived using
in vitro fertilization the base price for the procedure most likely cost between 12 to 15
thousand dollars. But due to additional medication and constant doctor checkups,
the average cost for IVF is closer to $20,000. And that is before you’re even brought into the world!
The price for you to be born in a hospital varies based on location, but on average,
a natural birth costs somewhere between 5,000 and 11,000 dollars. If there are complications
and your mother needs a C-section, the price tag for giving birth can go up another $3,000.
Basically, being born is an expensive prospect, but that is nothing compared
to how much the rest of your life will cost. We are going to take the time right now to
mention that the cost of an entire life will vary by country, state, and even neighborhood
but for this scenario let’s imagine you were born a healthy baby in the United States.
So, now that you’ve been brought into the world, the next set of expenses start to add up.
According to the U.S. Surgeon General, the average cost of food and formula for a baby’s
first year of living is around $1,500. And all of that food has to go somewhere,
so you are costing your parents another $1,000 on diapers simultaneously.
And this doesn’t even include things like clothing, toys, and strollers,
which you will eventually grow out of. The cost of raising an infant is
estimated to be around $13,000 annually for the first few years of their life.
At some point, your parents will have to go back to work to pay for your cost of living,
which means you will require some form of daycare which usually runs up a bill of
somewhere around $8,500 a year. This does not include the money that needs to be shelled out
for babysitters so your parents can enjoy an evening without you every once in a while.
The crazy part is that as you grow up, you become more expensive. Everything you need like food,
clothing, school, transportation, hobbies, and making sure you’re healthy costs money.
By the time you grow up to be a teenager, your life cost will be somewhere around $300,000.
Your teenage years and early twenties are among the most expensive times of your life,
so your price tag is about to skyrocket.
To start, the average price of being a teenager is around $15,000 a year. During this time of life,
food costs increase as growing teens require a lot of nutrients during puberty.
Most of you also started driving in your teenage years. Even if you pay for your own car,
you’ll still need to be insured. Your parents will likely pay that bill and since insurance
companies see you as a high risk, this can cost around $2,000 annually.
Then there are the school expenses. Your parents will most likely send you to a public school,
so there is no tuition fee. But if they want you in a good school district,
the amount of taxes they will have to pay will be higher, meaning they are forking
over more money to the government to give you the best education possible. On top of that,
there are school supplies and equipment you will need for all of the extracurriculars you do.
This means your educational costs in middle and high school are around $2,100 a year.
Now you’ve entered perhaps the most expensive part of your life.
College is a great time to find yourself and what you’re interested in. However,
this comes at a price. The average cost for a 4-year course
is somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000 dollars a year. Unfortunately, you may
decide that you want to go to a private college where you will pay closer to $50,000 annually.
This means that if you graduate on time, your college tuition costs could be close to $200,000.
Hopefully you will get scholarships and financial aid, but that’s not guaranteed.
And since textbooks in college cost somewhere around $1000 dollars a year at some institutions,
you’re life costs a lot more than just the tuition price alone during college.
This doesn’t even take into consideration the approximately $5,000 a year you will
spend on food, and that’s if you are conservative with your eating habits.
It is not out of the realm of possibility that you will incur costs in the hundreds of thousands of
dollars during your four years at college. And you haven’t even entered the “real world” yet.
Luckily, if you get a good job, you’ll be able to live comfortably and hopefully pay off some
of that debt. Even so, we haven’t looked at how expensive being an adult can be.
The average adult spends around $400 on groceries each month. However, eating is not the largest
expense you will have at this point in your life. Since you are now working a full-time
job and making your own decisions, you will make mistakes. These could be things like spending
too much on online shopping or charging items to your credit card that you aren’t
able to pay off right away. These mistakes come with interest, and that’s a bad thing.
By the time you are a full-blown adult,
you will likely have somewhere around $90,000 worth of debt to your name.
The monthly cost of living for an adult can be broken down into key categories. Each one
contributes to the cost of your life. For example, the average cost of renting or owning a home is
around $1,600. This is a recurring expense for the duration of your life since you will always need a
place to live. Plus you also want health insurance of course, so every month your life cost increases
by another $1,000 just to protect yourself from becoming bankrupt from one hospital trip.
You will also likely have to go places, so you either need to use public transportation
or buy your own car. Either way, this is another expense that is incorporated into
the cost of your life. And no one wants to be stuck at home all of the time,
so you will also be taking vacations, visiting friends and family, or just
going abroad now and then. These expenditures will cost somewhere close to $12,000 a year.
There is one other major expense that adds to your life cost as an adult,
marriage. The average budget for a wedding is somewhere between 20,000 to 30,000 dollars.
This is a huge investment for one day of celebrating. However,
there is always the cost effective method of eloping or having a town hall wedding.
But there is something else to keep in mind during this part of life.
Close to 40% of marriages end in divorce. This means that there is a decent chance
you may have to spend $15,000 to finalize the divorce and move on with your life.
This brings us back to marriage; around 80% of divorcees get remarried. This doesn’t necessarily
mean you’ll be spending as much money on a second wedding as your first marriage,
but it also doesn’t mean you won’t. So, it is not out of the realm of possibility
that the cost of your life is inflated by marriages and divorces.
At some point, you will grow old. And as an elderly person, life doesn’t get any cheaper.
Up until this point, your life has been expensive and your cumulative life cost
is definitely in the millions, but don’t think retiring means you’ll stop racking up bills.
After you are out of your working years and happily retired, life gets expensive in a
different way. For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that the
average retiree spends around $50,000 a year. The major expenses change over time since,
during the early years of retirement, travel and leisure make up a large chunk of your budget.
However, after turning 75, the main expenses of living shift to medical costs
and making life as comfortable as possible. Most will choose to go to a nursing home
which costs around $9,000 a month to live in. This means senior you will shell out
over $100,000 a year for medical care and living space until the end of your life.
Not everyone goes to nursing homes, and some people spend much more than $100,000 a year
on an assisted living facility, but either way, getting old is expensive. Which brings
us to one of the most costly events in your life—and you aren’t even alive to see it.
Even though death is technically the end of your story,
it is the final expense that needs to be added to calculate how much your life costs.
On average, it costs approximately $20,000 to die. This is due to funeral and burial expenses,
but even if you’re cremated, you are looking at a pricetag close to $12,000.
So, from being born to dying it is expensive to be a human. But
how expensive? You know your life is worth well into the millions
if you’ve been adding up the numbers as we’ve gone along. But how many millions exactly?
Your childhood from birth to the teenage years costs around $300,000. Then from being a teenager
and going to college, you can add another $300,000 to your total cost of living. At this point,
your life has cost over $500,000, but you’re only about a quarter of the way through it. You have to
live the adult life and all the expenses that come with it for around 30 years before you can retire.
Your life as a senior citizen will incur another million dollars or so
worth of expenses based on the path you choose for retirement and senior living.
And these numbers are based on you only making it to the age of 80. If you live longer, your
life costs more. And since the end of someone’s life is where the cost of living increases due to
medical needs and lifestyle in general, the cost of your life could grow exponentially.
When all is said and done the value of your entire life will be somewhere between 3 and
10 million dollars. This is a rough estimate as everyones’ life will be different depending
on the country they were born in and their decisions. But think of how crazy these numbers
are. You likely will never be a millionaire, yet your life is worth many millions of dollars.
Regardless of where you live or your circumstances,
you are priceless to us here at The Infographics Show and we appreciate you for being you.
Now watch “How Much Is An Entire Human Body Worth?”
Or check out “Rent An Army: How Much Does It Actually Cost?”