Karina Reid, 44 saving $700 a month
When Reid’s son Alex was born in 2012, she made the difficult decision to put on hold her career as an account director of sales at a large hotel chain, to stay home and look after him.
When he was 7 months, she put Alex’s name on a waiting list for a daycare spot near her home in Kitsilano. The daycare called four years later, but by that time, she and her husband Andrew had already left Vancouver and its astronomical rents behind and moved to Richmond.
There, they got a four-bedroom unit in co-op housing and snagged a daycare spot for their second child, Ben, born in 2014.
The Richmond daycare was chosen as one of the 50 prototype sites. On Nov. 1, Reid got a break on fees for Ben, who goes part-time. She pays $120 a month for his daycare.
As a result, they are saving $700 a month — which means they are debt-free for the first time since they became parents. It also meant they could take a trip that was once out of reach.
“I have never visited my brother in Mexico — he lives in Mexico City — and I was like, ‘Well, you know what, this is a huge surprise that we didn’t really know was going to happen,’ and I finally just went to go visit him,” Karina explained. “That to me is a luxury. I wouldn’t have been able to just take that opportunity to go visit him if this hadn’t happened.”
She added the family is eyeing more travel in the near future, possibly to Costa Rica.
“We’re normally that family that would just go camping or do local trips, and now we’re thinking a little bit bigger.”
Reid, who now works on contract as a sales director, said cheaper child care will help women like her who have to choose between a career and caring for children.
“Having this ability to have affordable child care will help more women enter into the workforce,” she said. “(And) maybe not necessarily make a choice, which I did for my family, of not going back to work, because it was unaffordable to send two kids to daycare.”