Having a job has costs. It’s well known that your job may need certain professional dress attire, or tools. Maybe the job requires traveling. Maybe the job requires a specific college degree, which costs thousands of dollars to earn.

Maybe the networking requirements, or simply the social expectations, include going out to eat for business lunches, or coffee, or happy hours. That has expenses both financial and health, and means you can’t run errands or actually decompress during your lunch or break, and are that much later getting home from work.

But some are less easily quantifiable, less discussed, and extremely important.

If you are considering putting off having children for the sake of your career, to build a better professional or financial base, there are a lot of implications.

The careers that require you to have build that base, aren’t likely to be as friendly towards you spending time on your family once you have them. If your love language is to receive (and therefore you’re also more likely to give) gifts, maybe that additional financial stability helps you feel like you have the funds to give more expensive gifts. But if, like me, your primary love language is quality time, it can be emotionally devastating to realize that the career you’ve chosen won’t ease up on the stress and time commitment to spend the level of time with your children that you are driven to.

Those who haven’t been in these situations yet don’t understand how hard they are to get out of. If your job requires 50-80 hours per week, with lots of unrelenting stress and no recovery time, that is not only a loss of time, it likely comes with unpleasant management. Unpleasant clients. Burn out. Mental exhaustion. Loss of emotional coping. Physical decay from the sleep deprivation, the emotional drain, the lack of time and energy to exercise. No ability to scale back, no matter what life situation has come your way, whether it’s your kids are being bullied in school or your parents are failing. If you cut back to part-time, your pay and benefits are guaranteed to decrease, but your workload may not. You often can’t get a part-time job somewhere else, meaning you’re now stuck with your current employer, no matter how toxic or undesirable the situation has become.

Maybe you continue to put off and put off having children, only to realize that you now only biologically have time to have one child when you want more, or that you’ve reached infertility. Before you get to that state, please go read this article by two guest bloggers for Meg Bartelt’s Flow Financial Planning, about the numbers associated with fertility. It may, unfortunately, be eye-opening, on the probabilities and emotional strain front, as well as the financial costs (costs are guaranteed, live healthy babies are not).

And now, by having kids later in life, if you manage to have children later in life, you may be more exhausted/less able to play with those kids. You may have limited your time or ability to enjoy grandkids, and great grandkids.

What are your life priorities? Is the life structure you are in now helping support you in them, or actively getting in the way of the life you want to live?