To ask how much you saved before TTC?

[EastDulwichWife]

Did you save before TTC? Or did you start saving once you had conceived?

How much did you set aside for the first year, plus?

I know the quantity will vary hugely, depending on lifestyle / location, but I'd love to know what you based your savings on. For example, enough to bolster the gap between maternity pay and your regular income for 6/9/12 months.

We had general savings but set aside maternity savings to cover the difference in pay for the year plus extra so that I could go out and about and enjoy doing things rather than be stuck home all day. All my friends work so I would have gone stir crazy scrimping by at home.

NCT sales will help you save a fortune when it comes to getting baby clothes/stuff. Also - it's amazing what you can find in charity shops!

We lived on DH's salary + SMP for almost a year to make sure we could do it. We saved the rest of my salary. We're buying a house which obviously will eat into our savings but if all goes to plan budget-wise we'll have a £12k cushion to cover baby expenses and any emergencies during my mat leave. (Hopefully we won't need to use much of it as we'll use for house renovations once I'm back at work.)

We moved out of London to make this possible so we wanted to make sure we really did it right!

Got pregnant on the pill so no saving! Currently doing up the house so that it is child friendly and so that decorating is done an d not needed to be done when baby is here. So I'm not sure how much were going to save. Maybe 1500 by the time she's here as back up? I'm going to be on smp too as I wasn't in my job long enough to get full maternity company entitlement. Had to have been there a year..

We have no debts except the mortgage and a car on finance.

Saved enough to pay the mortgage for a year. It would be impossible to live on my DH's salary alone. We live in the SE and have a relatively big mortgage for a fairly modest (3 bed terraced) house.

We used savings to pay the mortgage, DH paid everything else and I lived off the SMP. I wanted the whole year off so I'm glad we did it that way. Without savings I would have had to return to work very early.

Babies aren't expensive in terms of "stuff" it's the loss of earnings that hits. If you can manage on one salary (even at a pinch) then it's less of an issue.

Thousands.
Which increased as time went on.
Then I blew it all on (successful, I am fortunate to say) IVF

Nothing.

And no one I know did, either.

@allthewaves sorry to hear that. Must have been a relief to have set yourself up beforehand.

We're debt free (except the mortgage), which I know is fortunate. Family sized house we've been in for a few years, with a couple of £k put aside for improvements this year.

I'd love a year off so that'll be the motivation for saving as much as possible. A few have mentioned bridging the gap between SMP and salary. Might be tough but a good aim. Glad we don't need to worry about it though - or push back our plans. It's been a long time coming...!

Nothing - I knew NHS mat leave terms (better now, but still pretty good 16 years ago). We got a lot of stuff second hand - cot (with new mattress) and a shedload of clothes - including some I wore as a baby. We invested in washable nappies, which was well worth it. Most of what the DDs had as babies was second hand, from charity shops and boot sales.

What killed was going back to work an paying for childcare - 2/3 of my pay went on childcare by the time we had DD2 in nursery, and costs have risen so fast it would be worse now. I'd be saving for that, not for things for the baby.

Less than zilch (we were overdrawn). All came right financially in the end.

About six months' pay. I'm not sure how anyone can plan a baby and not save up - what do you think you're going to live on?

I wasn't entitled to maternity benefits (recent immigrant, last income foreign research grant) and dh was on quite a low wage- advantage was there was little need to compensate for drop in lifestyle as it was already quite frugal.

Nothing while TTC, we had a really stressful time of it and it took a very long time, and one of the ways we helped ourselves cope with that was lots of holidays! Saving hard since getting pregnant, and will have £8k saved by the time I go on maternity leave, to top up SMP and enable me to take 9-10 months off.

We saved just enough to bridge the gap between income for mat leave and our basic outgoings. However we also bought everything before dd was born for pretty much the whole of mat leave including 6months of nappies (buying with the weekly shop during pregnancy) and clothes up to 12months in second hand bundles.

Nothing. DS was a complete surprise after DP had been proclaimed infertile. Also, I lost my job when I was 6 months pregnant and DP lost his when DS was 9 months old. It took us 3 years to fully recover from financial shit caused by this. Mainly because we haven't really been overly careful with money, we could've probably done it in 2 years

Once we found out, we saved £700 a month. So 10 months.
I only got statutory so this was a cushion to pay a chunk of our monthly outgoings. In the end we didn't use it all so spent it on our first family holiday abroad.

Nothing. At the time we had tiny mortgage and super duper incomes.

Don't do what we did and sell home bought for a song back in the day and buy a half tumble down cottage moneypit when the children were tiny. Now THAT was stupid Tis lovely now but sheesh. New roof, heaps of scaffolding, a handful of inquisitive children? Rewire electrics, uncover a hole in kitchen floor (actually a well fgs)? Great idea. Ugh. HarharHAR how we laughed.

Sorry for essay #cathartic

All of my bonuses went towards baby savings, probably about 4K, went up considerably by the time I actually fell pregnant.
DH wanted to start TTC as soon as we got married but I wanted to build up some savings as we had both had really poor childhoods. So we delayed by 6 months or so.

Nothing really - but I got 6 months full pay and then another 3 on smp. We always had a lot spare each month so we just saved that and didn't save. Now, with a bigger house and 2 in full time child care things are a lot tighter!

*spent that!

I was (and am) the main breadwinner so I saved the difference between maternity pay (which was stat minimum) and my post tax salary. Then we had loads of it left at the end of the year as I found it much cheaper having a baby than it was to be at work! I earn lots more now so if we do it again I'll probably save a bit less than that - just what we need. Biggest current expense is childcare.

We have a few fans saved for rainy days between us, but that wasn't baby dependant. Before we tried to get pregnant we had a look at how much mat pay I will get and how long we can spread that out, and made sure we could afford it but other than that we just went for it.

About 28,000 but it wasn't intended as it took us 9 years to conceive DD and we just kept saving at that level, we did have more it was used toward fertility treatment, so we only had around 28k when I found out I was pregnant. We stopped saving then too as we just didn't need to (we only kept saving in case we needed more treatment)

I work in the NHS so maternity pay is pretty good but all money stops after 9 months.

It was always my intention to have a little longer than 9 months off so following conception up until the the birth we saved £3'000 to put aside to cover another few months of me having unpaid maternity leave.

I'm now pregnant with DS2 but we haven't saved anything time time as both DH have better paid jobs now and are more financially secure so we don't need to worry so much about what we'll do when my NHS maternity pay stops.

We didn't save anything. Our finances are totally shared, and even before pregnancy my wages always went straight into a joint savings account anyway (not a very high earner) and we used DHs wages for everything else from the joint current account. It just meant that we didn't save as much while I was on maternity leave.