Our 5 Big Budget Changes with a Newborn
Introduction
It’ll come as no surprise that having a baby will change your finances. When our son was born in November 2020, we felt fairly confident that we had all the necessary changes made to our budget. It turned out that we budgeted pretty close in most areas, some were a surprise, but overall quite the relief.
It did turn out that babies are expensive and putting our son in a potato sack with holes for his head and arms wasn’t quite going to cut it.
I’m hoping that by breaking down where our budget changed going from no kids to a baby, it’ll offer some insight for those entering similar situations.
What this doesn’t include
This post isn’t going to include what we paid prior to Malcolm’s birth. That includes nursery furniture, baby clothes we had received and purchased, as well as postpartum supplies that we had already purchased.
Individual to Family Health Insurance (& dental)
While every family will be different, since we got married in September 2019 it has been cheaper for my husband and I to each hold our own individual health insurance rather than entering into a family insurance plan. Now that Malcolm is here, we had to move to a family insurance plan anyway, so all three of us are on one plan now.
To provide some insight into how this broke down for us, I’ll share some numbers. My husband and I were each paying $128.88/month for health insurance while on our own respective plans. Did you know we have the same employer? It makes calculating and finding all these numbers much easier. Total a month we would pay $257.76.
Now that we have switched to a family plan, we are paying $671.13/month. Yes, it’s quite a bit more than what we were previously paying, but there’s really no way around it, we need insurance for our baby! Also I hadn’t paid much attention to these numbers until we became pregnant. It’s comforting to know that in terms of what we are paying for our monthly premiums, there won’t be any increases when we have another child.
While writing this post I realized that I wasn’t even sure if we switched to family dental, but it turns out that we did. Mom brain is a real thing! For dental we were individually paying $16.06/month, and now pay $43.21/month for our family.
Breastfeeding Related
Besides the massive nutritional benefits that breastfeeding provides to newborns (and infants and toddlers!), I was really committed to breastfeeding because it seemed a whole lot cheaper than formula. I could probably do a whole post on this (and maybe I will in the future!) but there are so many expenses that come along with breastfeeding that I knew nothing about.
None of this is to say that I wouldn’t choose to breastfeed if I could go back to when Malcolm was born. Our breastfeeding journey has been so challenging in so many ways but also one of the most rewarding things I’ve experienced.
For several weeks after Malcolm was born I chose to pump due to being diagnosed with mastitis twice in a row, as well as a bad latch that took us a minute to get revised. We ended up needing to purchase several new pump parts prior to me going back to work. These parts weren’t expensive per se, but they do need to be replaced at regular intervals. This is something that I had no idea about, but is something we’ll put into the budget moving forward.
Another breastfeeding expense that I couldn’t quite predict was all the snacks I would want! You’d think after being pregnant for 9 months you’d be used to snacking, but I truly thought that would be over once baby was here. Nope. So many snacks. While I’m mindful of our grocery budget, obviously what I’m craving is always something that we don’t have at home… Target drive-up has definitely helped (or hurt, depending on how ya look at it lol) us in this area.
Diapers, clothes, etc.
Holy cow do babies go through a lot of diapers! We’re using disposable diapers and not cloth, so I knew our diaper costs would add up. Something I’m glad we did however was to not buy too many boxes of each size of diapers before Malcolm was born. So far it’s allowed us to use up, for example, all our size ones and then jump to size two once he was at a higher weight. Babies grow fast and we wouldn’t have needed more than two boxes of the smallest sizes.
In terms of baby clothes, we were super lucky to have received so many great pre-loved pieces from family members. When we have needed (or wanted, let’s be honest, baby clothes are so cute!) we’ve found great deals at either Target or own our local buy/sell/thrift pages on Facebook. We’ve been able to find some super budget friendly, high quality items on the Facebook pages.
Childcare
This is another expense that we obviously couldn’t have had before the baby was born. We’re very lucky that my mom is able and willing to watch Malcolm while we are working! My schedule is Tuesday-Friday which makes it so I’m home with him on Monday’s.
We did do some research into daycares in our area and they are quite spendy! It might be the area we live in but it’s easy to see how childcare can very easily be a major expense once
Baby’s preference
We’ve gotten pretty lucky in this area! We purchased Up & Up brand diapers from Target before baby came and it turns out that those are working perfectly for us thus far. We were also lucky to have received an Ollie brand swaddle which ended up being his favorite by far! Especially compared to the swaddle type that you receive at the hospital. We ended up not buying a second Ollie even though it might have been nice with how much our little guy spits up. The two areas that we needed to try several of due to baby’s preference were pacifiers and bottles.
Malcolm isn’t a huge pacifier fan (we are hoping to change this lol) but we tried a few different brands (aka purchased a small number of packs) and he ended up taking best to the ‘Wubbanub’ pacifiers with the little animal attached.
I didn’t realize how many different types of newborn/infant bottles there are or how finding the right bottle can be helpful in keeping a breastfeeding journey continuing successfully. You will find a ton of opinions on bottles online, but we found that the ‘Tommee Tippee’ bottles with a slow flow/preemie nipple are working well for us.
In Summary
As you can tell, having a baby required us to make some changes to our budget in major ways. There are five major areas that we changed and/or added to our budget following the birth of our son, Malcolm. These areas include: health/dental insurance, breastfeeding related expenses, diapers and clothing, childcare, and expenses related to baby’s preferences. All of these changes can be budgeted for prior to baby’s birth and I highly recommend that you try and do so, as to not have them take your family by surprise during the already foggy newborn days.
What areas of your budget changed the most after having kids?! Share below!