Danbury One of Priciest Places to Raise a Family: New Study

People around here have been saying this for years.

“In some spots in this country, it costs parents well into six figures just to eke by,”MarketWatch.com reports, citing data released this week by the nonprofit and nonpartisan think tank the Economic Policy Institute.

Danbury is one of those spots.

“This does not mean a middle-class lifestyle,” said Elise Gould, a senior economist with EPI. “This is just living, no savings.”

In terms of a 2-parent, 2-child household, Danbury clocks in at tenth most expensive to raise a family, just behind San Francisco (No. 9) and Ithaca, New York (No. 8)

“With high housing and child-care costs, as well as high taxes, it will cost a family of four just over $89,000 to pay the bills in this city.” MarketWatch says about Danbury.

This is not about the poverty line.

“The basic family budgets presented in the report, as well as those presented via theFamily Budget Calculator itself, measure the income families need in order to attain a secure yet modest living standard where they live by estimating community-specific costs of housing, food, child care, transportation, health care, other necessities, and taxes,” according to EPI.

Child care is the single most expensive line item for these families: In 500 of the 618 areas that EPI looked at, child care was parents’ biggest annual expense, averaging about $12,500 a year nationwide and climbing above $30,000 a year in one city, MarketWatch reported.

Read What Families Need to Get By: EPI’s 2015 Budget Calculator and figure out your own community’s costs.

Read the full MarketWatch report here.