The accounting of raising future presidents
I have been busy with the accounting closes, the year-end audits, and the team goals. I have also been busy completing some urgent and important priorities related to raising my daughters. School applications, financial aid applications, and summer camp applications are top priorities that keep me busy outside of my working hours. My deadline to finalize the applications and the summer plans is the end of February. I have spent my weekends googling summer camps, reviewing curricula, sending emails to admission officers, and working out our budgets.
My daughters, (almost 9 and 6) are going to be presidents. They manifested it, and as a Black immigrant mother, I am fully invested in supporting their goals. Our household has regular discussions, tears, and agreements about who will be the first and who will be president of what. Countries are divided for ice cream, frontiers are displaced for the promises of iPads and wars are avoided through parental diplomacy.
At the presidential podium! Drawing by Jordyn.
My first daughter, who made her intentions known four years ago, has been monitoring VP Harris, noting that if Mrs. Harris doesn’t become president, she would be the first female Black president of the US. I pointed out that there is a long line of potential candidates ahead of her and she settled by answering that she would be the first Black female president with origins from Haiti. She is also campaigning against her sister, taking claims of absolute power as her birthright. I intervened and noted that Canada was an option as well (although Michael Jean has already been the first Black female governor with ties from Haiti in Canada). I also explained that there were many opportunities for them to become the leaders of other organizations, public or private or not-for-profits, or to even be founders of their own companies (they do not want to study accounting).
Raising future presidents demands valuable parental and financial investments. For my Black moms’ groups, it is a critical mission that requires many mastermind sessions and, of course, dissecting the journeys of those who have made it. When Claudine Gay was nominated the first female Black president of Harvard (her parents are Haitian), my daughters watched her announcement video with admiration, our Whatsapp groups celebrated and all the moms felt validated.
As I was just in the middle of a school application, I went number-crunching and made some estimates. Mrs. Gay attended Phillips Exeter Academy, studied at Stanford University, and earned a PhD from Harvard. The current (lower-range) estimate of her education from high school to graduate school is $920,000. There are different avenues such as financial aid, grants, work-study, summer jobs, internships, or other programs that can alleviate the annual financial burden, but the parents and the students usually end up footing a portion of the bills. Students usually end up taking significant loans that they spend decades paying back.
Estimated education expenses (my best estimates)
Education is an investment, the best investment in our modern world. For a middle class Black family, education is a privilege, working is a privilege, and that privilege is financial hefty. Like many parents, I had to pay to have the privilege of working. I sent my daughters to daycare when they were 3 months-old and for many years spent more than $50,000 annually (Paying to work will be a different newsletter). My parents did the same.
Education is an asset, an asset is anything you own that provides future financial value. Education is an asset that rarely depreciates. For my daughters, education is their best asset, their intangible enabler to become future presidents.
Every year, as I close out my financial year (we use Quickbooks) , I wonder if I should capitalize all of these expenses: the tuition expenses, the summer camp fees, the museum subscriptions and the mileage of driving to all of these activities. I wonder how I can present these investments in my daughters’ balance sheets. Should I start creating their balance sheets? And if they do become presidents, am I also investing for the countries, the organizations, the teams, the household, they are going to lead?
I wanted to post something relevant for Black History Month. Behind every black leader, there are parents that made significant investments, took significant loans, worked long hours and sacrificed their financial freedom.
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