To have a baby, although we can't afford it?

[Justcruisingonthewater]

I turned 33 in May. My husband is 36. Due to untimely bereavements we do own our home outright which certainly isn't a mansion - it's a terraced house with a garden though and is pleasant enough. We've also got a small income from another flat we own and let out.

My husband works in a supermarket and is an assistant manager but doesn't earn much. I did have a professional career but stopped recently. I now want to retrain. I do work as a care assistant but earn a pittance!

Here's the dilemma. If I have a baby before or during retraining we can't afford it strictly speaking. If I have a baby after retraining I'll be 36 and realistically 37 before I can ttc.

So - would we bu to try for a baby soon-ish? Or should we leave it?

It's hard to know how to advise you as you haven't said what you want to train to do.

Are you going to go to university?

If so, I'd be trying for the baby now, get SMP from your current job. Then look at doing your degree distance/part time. There are often nurseries on site for universities and colleges that that are heavily subsidised and you might be entitled to student loans/burseries to pay for that, again, worth investigating now.

Study/train for 3 years, by which point your DC will be 4, aim for DC2 then, when you are in your new career and can get a second lot of mat leave from them, this also means you'll only have 1 pre-school DC at a time when trying to pay for childcare. (If you want more than one, look at just how much you'd have to earn to break even with 2 pre-school DCs and no family childcare).

Would there be any scope for DH to be promoted in the not too distant future? Is there possibilty of increasing your family income that way?

What would you rather in 5 years time?
a) to have children but be in debt or
b) to have money but no children (and getting on a bit in fertility terms)

If it's more important to you to have children than money, don't wait
If it's more important to you to have money than children, do.

If you can't decide, you probably don't want to have children that much.

Ovenchips speaks very good sense. I didn't give that a second thought till I had ds, thought, oooh I'd really like to do all this again, several times, then realised that unless I was happy with very small gaps (ie a year or less... Which I wasn't, I definitely needed to give my body some time to recover) our ages (mine and dh's, who is nearly a decade older than me) would limit us to two children :-(