We spend HK$12,000 a month on my children's education. Is it worth it?

I work in finance. I do this with numbers for a living. You would think this would make me immune to the particular irrationality of Hong Kong education spending. You would be wrong.

Let me give you the breakdown. This is not hypothetical. These are my actual monthly numbers.

Mandarin class: HK$1,800 per child, two children, HK$3,600. Swimming (competition stream): HK$1,200 per child, two children, HK$2,400. Piano: HK$1,500 for the older one. Maths enrichment (older child, P4 level): HK$2,200 per month. English reading programme (younger child): HK$1,800 per month.

Total: HK$11,500, call it HK$12,000 with materials, exam fees averaged out, and the occasional emergency workbook I panic-bought from the bookshop in Sha Tin Plaza.

Both my children are in government primary schools. We pay no tuition fees. The HK$12,000 is entirely supplementary — things on top of the free education they are already receiving.

I did the annualised calculation: HK$144,000 per year. Over a ten-year primary and secondary education, assuming costs hold steady and I don't add anything else, that is HK$1.44 million. This is approximately a 20% deposit on a Sha Tin flat at current prices.

These numbers are not extreme for Hong Kong. I know families spending significantly more. I know families in our building who have three children and spend HK$20,000 to HK$25,000 monthly on supplementary education while the children attend the same government schools as mine. The spending is so normalised that until I actually put the numbers in a spreadsheet — which, again, I do for a living and somehow hadn't done for this — it didn't register as a significant financial decision.

The question I started asking myself: what am I getting for this?

The Mandarin is defensible. Mandarin literacy is genuinely useful in the Greater Bay Area context, it supplements what the school does, and my children enjoy the classes. I would keep this in an austerity scenario.

The swimming has dual value — fitness and potential scholarship pathways if either child develops serious competitive ability. The older one has times that suggest she might. Keeping.

Piano I've already written about separately. We restructured this after I realised it had become counterproductive. Net effect: same cost, much happier child, arguably better musical development.

The maths enrichment is where my financial brain runs into my parenting brain and the parenting brain wins, which is uncomfortable to admit. My daughter's school maths is fine. She is above average. The enrichment classes are for an imagined scenario in which she applies to a selective secondary and needs a higher baseline than "fine." I am paying HK$2,200 a month for an insurance policy against a risk that has a roughly 30% probability of mattering. This is not how I would structure any other investment. It is, however, what I currently pay.

The English reading programme for my younger child was prescribed, in a loose sense, by a developmental reading specialist who noted he was slightly behind his cohort in reading fluency. That context makes it feel necessary. But I notice I've been renewing it for a year past the point where his reading fluency is still behind. It has become habit.

Here is the honest version: some of this spending produces measurable outcomes. Some of it is purchasing peace of mind — which is a real thing, worth something, but not always worth what we're paying. And some of it is competitive anxiety spending: I am paying because other parents in my social circle are paying, and not paying feels like a signal that I don't care, which it isn't.

I recently spoke with a colleague whose children went to the same kind of government schools on a much smaller budget — almost none of this supplementary infrastructure. Both are now at university. One is doing engineering. Neither appears to have suffered from the absence of HK$12,000 monthly outlays.

I'm not planning to stop tomorrow. The activities have real value. But I am asking myself, for the first time with real rigour, whether each line item is earning its place. The maths enrichment is under review. The English reading programme will stop in June. I will put the savings in an account.

What I will not do is pretend this spending was all rational, necessary, or purely about my children's wellbeing. Some of it was. Some of it was about managing my own fear of being the parent who didn't try hard enough.

That is worth knowing, even if the spreadsheet doesn't have a column for it.