One of the most stressful parts of adding a person to your family, is figuring out how to pay for that person. They’re not exactly contributing to your household income (slackers). Most couples are faced with the choice- does one person stay home or do we hand our paychecks directly over to daycare? It is very easy to understand why many parents decide to become a single-income family. One month of daycare is just shy of our mortgage. I feel nauseous just writing that.
That’s my baby being the biggest boy at his daycare.
It didn’t make sense financially for either of us to stay home, but even more significant it didn’t make sense for us emotionally. I definitely wish it was something we could have felt was a real option, but when it comes down to it both of us really like our jobs. It was important to us to keep them. That didn’t stop me from being an emotional wreck going back to work. I also periodically re-lose my mind over being a working mom and all the guilt that comes with it. But that’s parenting no matter what you’re work situation is.
I’d love to tell you about how we saved and prepared for all our new costs in advance but…not really. Here’s what we had to tackle and how we handled it.
//Medical// First you have to birth a baby and that’ll cost you. Then they’re going to get sick and you’re going to have co-pays for the pediatrician ALL THE TIME. I was very lucky that a previous employer I had a Health Savings Account. Through employer funding and my contributions I had almost $6,000 saved by the time Haines came along. When our non-medicated birth delivered by a midwife was only a little over $1000 I was so excited that we had more we could use later. But only two weeks later we were back in the hospital for twelve days. Thank goodness we had those extra funds. Even with a healthy baby, you never know what could happen. Now, I make sure to fund a Medical Flexible Spending Account each year to get the tax savings on our inevitable medical costs.
//Childcare// If you are a dual-income family, chances are someone is watching that baby part of the day. I liked the daycare route for several reasons. I wanted Haines to learn good social skills and having some structure and routine around his day will be helpful when he transitions into school. I felt like daycare could provide more of that. It also seemed to be the most cost effective option (barely). I put the maximum into a Dependent Care Account which isn’t nearly enough. This part is painful. There’s no denying it.
//Diapers// We chose to cloth diaper via a diaper service for the first year. It cost about $80 a month, which was gifted to us. This is definitely the easiest way to cloth diaper- we loved it! But it’s not the most cost effective. Currently we do a mix of washing our own diapers and disposable. We’ve always had leak issues with cloth at night and when we travel we bring disposables. Still using cloth keeps our diaper costs down as well as our environmental impact.
//Formula// Obviously if you can breastfeed throughout the first year, you can avoid buying formula. That’s not always possible. We had to buy formula for 5 months which probably cost around $320. And that’s buying it at Costco. Now, daycares are required to provide formula so we could have saved by using their formula. But at around the same time a chemical, GenX, was found in our local water system. I wasn’t okay with our local daycare mixing the formula with tap water so we brought our own.
//Food// Haines ate pureed food for less than 2 months. He is not a fan of having people feed him. We made all of his food to keep costs low. I think it’s a little much to buy a special blender for baby food- I mean it’s just a tiny blender but we were gifted a freezer tray for baby food and I’m a huge fan. Now I freeze chicken stock in it.
Now he’ll eat most (like 60%) of the things we make for dinner but we keep certain staples on hand for him at all times: fruit canned in its own juice, applesauce (most often homemade and frozen), frozen veggies (corn, green beans, lima beans, peas) and either Chex or Kix.
//Clothes// Most of Haines’ clothes are gifts. I try not to buy much for him and as he’s the only grandson in our family, people are very generous! Anything we have to buy is from second hand kid clothing shops and semi-annual consignment sales. We probably spent around $50 last year on his clothes. I bought one pair of Target pajamas, two pairs of shoes, 5 pairs of shorts, 3-4 pairs of pants and a couple sweatshirts. Once he outgrows something it goes into a bag underneath his crib. Hypothetical baby number two and/or friends with babies will benefit!
One of our best second-hand finds!
//Toys// With very few exceptions, we don’t buy toys. We have plenty from hand-me-downs and gifts. We have purchased 1 second hand wooden train set and 1 activity walker from Fisher Price. We’re going to keep this up as long as possible by saying yes to hand-me-downs whenever they come!
//Baby bullshit// One person’s baby bullshit is another’s must have item. You know what yours is. I won’t call you out.
Paying for babies isn’t for the birds. Someone once told me that babies are cheap when they’re little. I call baby bullshit.
I’ve also been told that when it comes to babies the money always just seems to work out. It did for us, but it has almost entirely been through the generosity of others. Maybe that and a little luck. So the amounts here may seem small to you (if you have a child) or they may seem enormous (if you don’t). But it worked out. And it was worth it.
| Medical | $7,500 |
| Childcare | $7,020 |
| Diapers | $15/ month in disposables, plus free cloth diapering |
| Formula | $320 |
| Food | insi |
| Clothes | $50 |
| Toys | $50 |
| Bullshit | $30 |
Seeking Misadventure 