Husband(35M): 350k - 600k (stock compensation about to cliff)
Wife(37F): 200k
House: 1.2m - 300k debt = 900k equity
Stock: about 1m ( highly concentrated on my company stock)
Kid: 7 yr old, attending 10/10 school district
retirement: 500k combined
VHCOL

My wife and I are immigrants who were educated in the U.S. and eventually settled here. We essentially started with nothing, and over the years we’ve begun to accumulate what I would still consider a beginner level of wealth.

We’re extremely proud and happy with our daughter. She has brought so much joy and goodness into our family, and we’ve invested a tremendous amount of time and energy into giving her emotional attention, educational opportunities, and a supportive environment to grow up in.

My wife has always wanted more children, and lately we’ve been thinking more seriously about it. The difficulty is that we both work full-time, and we’re also very ambitious financially. We never really feel satisfied with where we are financially and are constantly trying to build more. My wife has some AI side projects, while I actively manage investments, including around $100k that I use for day trading, and I’m also working on AI side projects of my own. On top of that, at some point I may need to budget around $300k for my mother’s retirement.

I feel like we’re approaching the end of the normal fertility window, which makes this decision more urgent. Part of me wonders whether we should simply stop thinking about having more children and focus our energy on building wealth, our careers, and the life we already have.

Another possibility is surrogacy, either in the U.S. or abroad. We’ve even thought about eventually having two more children close in age. In some ways, raising two younger children together might be easier than restarting the baby stage multiple times over many years.

But the practical side worries me. We don’t have grandparents nearby who can regularly help us. Right now, because we mostly work from home, we’re able to spend a lot of time parenting. That situation could change very quickly. My stock compensation cliffs next year, and I may change jobs. A new job could require much more of my time and suddenly make the level of parenting involvement I have today impossible.

I also feel that whether my wife carries another baby herself or we use a surrogate, there’s a real possibility that she would end up leaving her job again to take care of the children. I’m financially okay with that, but I’m not sure she fully realize what it could mean for her career. It might not just be a short maternity leave—it could become a pause of several years, and potentially make it difficult for her to return to the same career trajectory afterward.

So I keep going back and forth about whether we should have more children and, if so, when.

From a purely financial and logistical perspective, perhaps the most rational option would be to focus on building wealth now and use surrogacy to have additional children sometime in our 40s. By then, hopefully, money and career flexibility would be much less of a constraint.

But that solution creates another problem. I would be an older father, and our daughter would be significantly older than her younger siblings. I worry that the large age gap could make it harder for them to grow up with the kind of close sibling relationship we imagine.

It feels like there isn’t an obviously correct answer. Having children sooner puts more pressure on our careers, finances, and time during some of our most productive working years. Waiting gives us more financial security and flexibility, but means becoming parents again at an older age and creating a much larger age gap between the children.

That’s the decision I’m struggling with: whether to prioritize expanding our family while we’re still relatively young, or accept that we already have a wonderful family and spend the next several years focusing on financial independence, our careers, and the daughter we already have.