A new survey finds that costs on back-to-school shopping lists are expected to increase by 6% this fall due to persistent inflation, forcing some parents to make difficult decisions between saving on school supplies or cutting back on other discretionary spending.
Parents of kindergarten through eighth grade students expect to spend an average of $333 on back-to-school preparations, up from $315 last year. Survey by game-based learning platform Prodigy found.
More than 10% of households said they couldn’t afford everything on the list, and about 25% of parents said they planned to buy second-hand items to cut costs, according to Prodigy.
Another 20% said they plan to rely on local programs to buy school supplies.
“This is shaping up to be the most expensive back-to-school shopping season ever,” Ricardo Rodriguez, senior data journalist at Prodigy, told The Washington Post.
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the cost of school supplies has increased 24.5% over the past four years.
“Parents are now facing rising prices for everything compared to what they were spending before the pandemic,” Rodriguez told The Post.
“As parents prioritise their budgets to cover rising school-related costs, they are likely to have less money to spend on leisure activities, impacting industries that rely on discretionary spending.”
In the survey, parents said they planned to spend $171 on clothing, $85 on school supplies and $57 on equipment such as lunch boxes and backpacks.
The survey found that the average expenditure on back-to-school preparations in New York City is expected to be even higher at $360, while Houston parents are expected to spend the highest in the nation at $443.
In another study, Intuit Credit Karma Nearly half of parents said they plan to sacrifice spending on necessities like groceries and medicine in order to buy school supplies, while 33% said they simply can’t afford to go back-to-school shopping this year, according to the survey.
In the survey, many parents said they would increase their credit card spending by borrowing between $500 and $750.
“Parents with young children are likely heading into the new school year with their hands already full after paying for summer child care, which is why many parents may be expecting to end up in the red on their back-to-school shopping this year,” Courtney Alleb, consumer finance advocate at Credit Karma, told Fox News.
