Pay Dirt is Slate’s money advice column. Have a question? Send it to Kristin and Ilyce here . (It’s anonymous!)

Dear Pay Dirt,

My husband and I love kids, and we had always planned to have our own. But now we’re in our early 30s and have realized kids are probably not in the cards financially—unless we can get some child care help from my in-laws.

My husband and I have the regular problems everyone has: crushing student loans and inability to afford more than a one-bedroom apartment. I also have a chronic illness that requires expensive drugs and yanks me out of the workforce for chunks of time, and my husband is in a career field that’s getting decimated by AI. We’re trying to work around this. He’s working on a career switch, and I’ve picked up a side gig to try to cover

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