You've got your numbers — now what

If you used the tool honestly, you now know something useful and narrow: roughly what a child would do to your monthly surplus, how long savings would absorb a shortfall, and the scale of the long-run cost. That is the entire financial picture, and it is genuinely worth having. It is also not the decision.

What the numbers settled, and what they didn't

The arithmetic can tell you whether money is a constraint here. Sometimes it clearly is, and that's worth knowing before anything else — a thin financial floor is a real thing to plan around, not push through on hope. But when the numbers leave room, they've done all they can. They cannot tell you whether you want this, whether you and a partner actually agree, or how you'd carry it. Those aren't smaller questions than the money. They're the actual ones.

The conversation a tool can't have for you

If there's a partner in this decision, the most important input was never on the slider — it's whether the two of you genuinely want the same thing, said out loud, more than once, when neither of you is performing the answer you think is expected. The Part 2 reflection on the home page is deliberately not scored precisely so it can't substitute for that conversation. It shows you the shape of your own thinking so you can bring it to the person it actually concerns.

If there's no partner, the questions don't get smaller — support, time, and your own pull toward it just carry more weight, and a trusted person to think out loud with matters more, not less.

When to talk to someone who isn't a website

Some versions of this decision are heavier than a calculator should pretend to hold: a real mismatch with a partner, a history that makes the question painful, pressure from family or a timeline that feels like it's deciding for you, or a sense that you can't think clearly about it at all. None of that is a math problem and none of it should be settled by a tool. A counsellor or therapist who works with this specifically is not a last resort — for a decision this size it's often the most useful single step, and far more valuable than any number on this site.

Take the figure. Leave the false certainty. Go have the conversation.