My son costs a lot

When Alpa Shah sat down with pencil and paper to add up the amount she has spent on her son Karan, since birth, the zeros didn't stop skyrocketing

Karan is in his 12th standard, studying commerce in HR College. The college fee is next to nothing, but the pocket money and tuition fees add up to quite a lot. I give him Rs4,000 every month as his pocket money, but this figure is quite flexible and is obviously likely to go up in the near future.

Barring this, expenditure on clothes, birthday bashes and gifts and of course parties als add up. But he is young and these are expenses that today's youth can't do without, which I understand. Apart from this, Karan spends a lot of money on stationery. He approaches me saying, 'Ma, I need to buy a book', 'I have to make some Xeroxes', the list is endless. 

His annual tuition fees are good enough to burn a hole in your pocket. As he is in te 12th grade, studies are important. This year alone I ended up paying about Rs60,000 on private tuitions, which includes only four subjects - French, Accounts, Math and Economics. With private tuitions and coaching classes becoming the chief place of study, sending your child to classes, whose costs are sky rocketing has become more or less a necessity.

As a parent, I would always want the best things for my child. So I wanted to put him in the best of schools, give him good coaching and ensure his all-round development. Karan studied in Bombay Scottish where the school fee was about Rs20, 000. In his tenth, I paid more than a Rs1 lakh on tuitions fees. With increasing competition, we are forced to shell out huge sums of money to ensure their admission into good colleges.

And then let's not forget travel expenditure. To get from one tuition class to another, he travelled mostly by taxi, and I easily spent about Rs15,000 - Rs20,000 only on his travel.

In his school, bus service was a compulsion and that cost me about Rs7, 000 to Rs10, 000, a year. Apart from that, there was sports, field trips, compulsory plays, uniforms, music, elocutions, et al, that had to be paid for.

In an ICSE school the stationery required is ample. I bought CDs from which Karan would study, which also was quite expensive. Even in his pre-school dats, I paid Rs18,000. My delivery was also a very expensive affair with the hospitals expenditure amounting to about Rs40,000 in those days.