How Much Does Homeschool Cost?
By Sun Kyu Bae |
Published April 15, 2009 |
Articles |
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I'm gonna to be honest here - the costs of homeschooling your child are enormous.
I know some of you may disagree, having done your own research into how expensive homeschool can be, but right, wrong or indifferent, I don’t believe those sources have given you the entire picture.
Actually, the price tag for a homeschool curriculum (teaching materials + school supplies) can be very reasonable – with the Internet, you can probably get your entire curriculum for free if you look hard enough (including on our site!), leaving only classroom supplies as the major costs. And if you buy your school supplies in bulk during the July/August back-to-school season, you can save a bundle, easily keeping your expenses under $50 per child.
Dollar Cost + Opportunity Cost = Total Cost
Then, how could I even start our article by writing that first sentence with a straight face (or in the writer’s case, steady fingers)?
Because I'm not referring to only the dollars required to buy curriculum and supplies. What I'm talking about is the time you will need to invest into your homeschool. If you want to do it right, homeschooling requires you to not only conduct lessons, but also select curriculum, plan the lessons, research homeschool community groups you are interested in joining, ensure that you are meeting rules and regulations of your state, etc. – when you add it all up I think you will see that home schooling not only turns into your new profession, it becomes a part of your life. This most likely means that you will need to cut back on hours for your day job, or quit your job altogether.
This sort of cost, when you cannot do something that you previously were able to do because of a new commitment you made, is what economists call “opportunity cost” – and since I can’t think of a cuter term at this moment, I’ll just go with that one for the rest of this article.
Anyway, the opportunity cost of you not going to work because you chose to homeschool is the amount of money that you could have made if you were working. Depending on your job , this cost varies – but I think it’s reasonable to say that for most of us, working shorter hours (or not at all) results in a significant drop in household income. And so, stress levels can increase because a lifestyle that we were once used to must now be relinquished for a more economic lifestyle (in our family, that means not going out to restaurants as much as we usually did), not to mention trying to absorb the new lifestyle required for homeschool.
Ironically, for most families, the actual dollar costs for homeschool usually do not factor into the overall homeschooling cost equation because the opportunity cost of lost income represents 99.9% of the entire cost of homeschooling, with the dollar cost for curriculum/supplies representing the remainder.
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