How We Financially Prepared for a Baby

As you may know, my husband and I were told that we couldn’t have children. However, when we did pull the trigger and begin to think about the next steps, we began to wonder if we could financially afford to have a baby. I thought about what our incomings are, outgoings are, how we spend money recreationally and if we could viably factor in the cost of a new-born and time off work on nothing, but statutory maternity pay. Before we took the leap, I sat down and carefully did some analysis on our expenditure to ensure that we were financially prepared for a baby.

 

 

Looked closely at our incomings and outgoings.

Step one whenever you think about your finances is to analyse your incomings and outgoings. By knowing what you have and where your money goes, you can further analyse what you need to save and how your money is allocated. Some people don’t like to analyse this as it can be easier to bury your head. However, I need order, organisation and planning. Understanding your money is one of the most important things you can do to ensure that you don’t end up with money issues.

 

Analysed what I would earn on statutory maternity.

The long and the short of statutory maternity pay is that you get 90% of your weekly earnings for the first 6 weeks of your maternity leave. From there, you get £172.48 or 90% of your weekly earnings (whatever is lowest). £172.48 per week when you have outgoings, bills and a new baby to contend with is absolutely disgusting. I tried to think about how far I could make that money stretch and what additional earnings I would need in the bank before I can commit to only earning £172.48 for 33 weeks.

 

Ensured that all debts were cleared.

I have never been the kind of person to get into debt. There were many lessons that I learnt from my parents; debt management was one of them. Simply because I saw them get into debt up to their eyeballs and my entire childhood was stood watching parents struggle to make ends meet. However, the debt I refer to are things like car payments and the odd item on my credit card. The credit card was an easy one to clear because I keep myself at a £500 so I never forget to clear it. When it comes to my car, I have it on PCP, so I made a large payment in order to reduce my monthly repayments.

 

Tried to reduce monthly payments as much as possible.

As I mentioned above, I have a document which clearly shows our incomings and outgoings. From here, I can analyse what we spend on what. This made me work hard to try and reduce our monthly payments as much as possible. Whether it was haggling with Sky to get a better package deal. Opting to go sim only rather than an expensive phone contract. Cancelling some of the many subscriptions such as Amazon, Netflix, Disney Plus and Paramount. There were so many areas what we could make savings, but for a long time we didn’t give it a second thought.

 

Thought carefully about what we were purchasing.

As you may be able to see from the other posts on my site, I am a lover of all thing’s luxury. The items that I purchase tend to come with a hefty price tag. However, in order to think forward about how financially prepared for a baby we were, I stopped the large purchases. Only temporarily. I wanted to get together what I can save when the larger and rather spendy purchases are taken out of the equation. This isn’t to say that I stopped buying designer, only that I considered the spend much more beforehand.

 

Mapped out expenditure during maternity leave.

Even though I have been working at my current company for 11 years and I am in a senior management position, they don’t offer anything more than statutory maternity. It is a little unheard of in this day and age, but that is simply the policy here. Plus, with other people having pregnancies over the last few years, it wouldn’t be professional for them to bend the rules for me. So, I had to take a look at what I earned in comparison to what I would be getting through the maternity period. Google it. It’s minuscule. But there is nothing I can do to change it. So I would rather be prepared.

 

Analysed our savings and what could be spent.

I am incredibly fortunate that we have savings, both together as a couple and separately. We have ‘fuck it’ money, which we spend on things like holidays and extravagant nights out. Then we have our true savings which is money that we remain untouched. If things really did go array, we had enough money to fall back on. I recognise that this is an incredibly unfortunate position to be in. But I know that if all our planning above fell apart at the seams, we would be ok.

 

As always, I hope you guys enjoyed reading this post about how we financially prepared for a baby. There is nothing over complicated to this. However taking some time to do this made me feel worlds better about jumping in with both feet. But I think ultimately, there is never a perfect time to have a baby. If you think about it for too long, you will begin to find a thousand reasons why you shouldn’t do it. I think it is one thing to think if you are able to afford a baby. But you have to be comfortable with adjusting your lifestyle to ensure that you can live comfortably through maternity and the early expensive months.