Charging our kids rent dilemma

I stumbled upon a Reddit thread the other week which got me thinking:

Should we charge our children rent?

As financial independence seekers, it would seem obvious to charge our children rent. It might seem like a ruthless side-hustle, but hear me out here.

I set up an impromptu 24 hour twitter poll which reached 2,875 people and 91 people voted.

I expected this to be divisive, but turns out not as much as I thought.

As I mentioned in my tweet, there are perhaps cultural and socio-economic factors to consider but I won’t be going into those here.

I’m going to be purely looking at this from the FIRE lens.

I will also assume that we will not need the income from charging our kids rent.

What I will say though is: there are families out there who are in some really bad financial situations. As soon as their children turn 18, they see their parental responsibility to provide as over and charge them rent. Sometimes charging them rent even whilst they are still in school.

This article makes no judgement.

In this post, I am talking about anytime from the age of 14 (the legal age to work in many countries). So this isn’t just about adults, but includes children. Just not too young though…

This is more of a thinking out-loud type of post. I will wear two hats and attempt to argue for each opposing side before concluding with what we will likely end up doing with our own children.

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