AIBU to ask how anyone affords to have children?

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DP and I are in our early 30s and people keep asking when we're going to have children, we're on the fence but we can't work out how anyone on our salaries can afford to have children. We're aware time is running out as it were (both my mum and nan hit perimenopause by 40 so aware that it's looming).
Am I missing something obvious?
My salary is roughly £1800 after tax, NI, pension and student loans. DP's is similar. Full time childcare for one child would ruin us financially at £400pw around here (and that would involve one of us working less hours to do pick ups as it closes at 6pm, so one salary would drop, the only way I could make it work would be to do 4 days work over 5 days).
We don't have £400pw spare after mortgage (£1300), bills, food and transport (£1500 if we cut to no eating out or buying lunches and really budget). The money we currently have spare per month (realistically this is a few hundred, but if we cut back to the bare bones as above it would be almost £800) is mostly eaten up in saving for small emergencies, holidays and events (e.g. The clutch went on the car recently, the washing machine needed repairing the next week, then it was MIL birthday the following week).
Benefits calculator (I never thought we would ever have to claim benefits) says we would be entitled to £18pw.
The best case scenario seems to be us being about £1000 short every month and having no spare money for any unexpected costs. We are trying to save at the moment but don't have enough to even get through mat leave.

So as not to drip feed:

• We have no parents or family living anywhere near us that could help with childcare, we had to move away from family for work and then further away again to be able to afford a house.
• 23 years left on the mortgage on a small 3 bed mid terrace in a relatively non expensive area.
• We have one second hand car that we own outright and share.

those both seem very low salaries for IT and HR. I would think you could both get higher paying jobs unless you are both in administration

So you would get child benefit which is roughly £95 a month (I'm guessing that's your £19 pw) btw that's universal for everyone earning less than 50k pp (soon to be 60k)

When your phone contracts come up you can go on sim only around £10 a month

You get the 20% tax relief on childcare
There is funding coming in from 9 months which would help

With child care if you go on families information service for your area it should list all childcare in your area . Childminders are likely cheaper than nurseries and potentially more flexible on hours. Where I live a nursery is £48 a day and a childminder is £35.

It's worth googling what the benefits cap is for UC you may be entitled to some if you jiggle your earnings (plus savings on child care)

Would any family be willing to help?

People manage on less. If you really want one you will find a way. Why didn't you buy a two bed or a flat? Sounds like you stretched yourselves a lot.

I would also look to reduce the food shopping bill. £500 a month is a lot for 2 adults. Look at blogs for cheap and easy meals. I tend to batch cook, which keeps costs down, even batch cooking baked potatoes, cooking them a couple of times until done when I’m cooking other things in the oven etc. Your energy bills look very high so any way you can cook more food at the same time in the oven would be useful, ie not cooking as often so batch cooking. Maybe buy an air fryer?

You say you have a pet. From memory, these aren’t costed above.

100% focus on inc salaries

£28k in IT age 28 ??? How!!!

Even un regions basic IT support 10y exp is £40k

Tell your husand to find a new job

My DH gone from 28-155k age 23-40
Easily get a 15-20% salary bump and problem resolved

£80 a day is low in our area. A friend of mine is has gone up to £132 per day in her area of London.

Could you do your jobs in a different area of the country? Somewhere with cheaper housing and childcare fees? Moving when you are going to have little ones is a good way to make new friends in an area. I sympathise, we found it really tough 14 years ago and we had a better ratio of salary to mortgage than you. I went part time for 14 years. For the first 5 years we were skint, selling things to buy prams, no holidays except camping in borrowed a tent or going to visit relatives. We did have one year where they were both in nursery 3 x a week and a relative helped us out financially because it was crippling. I can't imagine how difficult it is now with the increased cost of everything.

I hear you OP it’s really hard. I have to say it does seem your salaries are a bit low for what you do - can you look for new jobs with better money?

Other than that you could definitely shave some money off both your energy and food bills - I feed three of us on £400 a month (that’s all adult lunches etc as I take mine in and DP WFH, however DS has lunch at nursery or my mums three times a week) Reduce your meat and alcohol intake, I see you already cook from scratch.

Our energy direct debit is £110 a month. This month our bill was £140 and our account is £200 odd in credit. This is a well insulated three bed terrace with three of us living here and central heating set at 18 degrees. You can definitely cut your energy usage or move suppliers unless there’s some disability or something where you need shitloads of energy.

I know it’s not life changing but there’s a couple of hundred quid a month.

Yeah it’s £95 a day here in the baby room

They cut down their food bill & their fuel bill which are exceptionally high for 2 people.They downsize to a two bedroom property which is all they need, They get a part time job in the evenings/ weekends. As I said if they want a child they will make it work. It’s not that difficult to understand.

A tax free government childcare account will save you money.

At the moment you start getting free nursery hours at 2 yrs old so costs will only be high for a year if you take a year maternity leave.

How much mat leave do your company offer? Can you share some of it with DP?

If you decide you do want children, just do it and don't wait. You will make it work.

That sounds hard. I think really trying improve your pay (it sounds low for your jobs) is key.

Thereafter trying to figure out a short term plan for part time or flexible working. The preschool years fly by, they really do. It seems like a long time at the start but they pass really quickly.

Finally we have found a childminder much more affordable than nursery and much better suited to us. We've only been able to go down that road due to new WFH/flexible hours since COVID. Pre-covid we had long commutes and inflexible office hours that required long nursery hours. We are so much happier now.

Good luck.

Do neither of you WFH ever?

Well, we decided to try to have good part of our mortgage paid off before I got pregnant. We were paying a huge interest rate - over 15% - with the advantage of more years than you I can tell you that 2% was historically low and bound not to last. We cut everything to the bone - I told my husband he could use paper towels and have real orange juice once we got the mortgage paid off. Our wedding was nice and elegant but without the huge fanfare that goes on nowadays about hen nights, stag nights and so on. We bought a place up lots of steps - hilly city - so it was nice but cheaper. Furniture and baby stuff was largely bought secondhand - nice stuff though. I always used the work loos before I came home to save on loo paper. I haunted consignment boutiques for work clothes.

There was no maternity pay in those days. I practically worked up to the due date, and would have if I hadn't had blood pressure problems. I was back at work six weeks after a c-section. My husband took the next six weeks as paternity leave. I got a payment from my employers when I was back six weeks which helped.

I'm not saying we lived on fatty sausages because we didn't. We did cook from scratch with seasonal ingredients. We went to cheap supermarkets. We didn't have pets. Our family only give Xmas and birthday presents to children - so MIL's birthday present wouldn't have derailed our budget. We had cheap fuel efficient cars which we kept till they died. We travelled to my home town for Xmas and stayed with family.

Those sacrifices paid off. We are now living in a big detached house without millions of steps in a lovely expensive suburb. We had two children - I was 34 for the first and 37 for the second. The eldest is a fifth year med student and the youngest is a recent arts graduate looking for a job. We decided we could afford a cat which we self insure for and it is much loved.

Have you considered getting a cash in hand job to do in the evenings like bar work or deliveries? A few mums I know do this and it's topping up their income nicely. I think that you have to go around the fast food shops and ask if they need drivers but might be worth it.

I know it is hard, with my first I was in the fortunate position to not go back to work if I chose to, but now with my 2nd I can't even contemplate that. Everything is so much more expensive and salaries haven't gone up much. I am utterly scared of what the future holds but I am hoping that with the tax free childcare kicking in earlier now, we'll somehow make it work.

somehow u make it work and sounds like you both have a home, jobs and aren't in debt so a far better place than many to start a family

when i was number crunching the best solution was for both parents to drop a day - if u both do a 4 day week and have 3 days childcare to cover. Even better if your employees would let u both do compressed hours

We made it work by saving a lot before children and also doing things like fixing niggles in the car and house; making sure white goods were replaced if they were coming towards end of life etc. That meant we could minimise our expenses during the very expensive childcare period.

If you and our DH are both in stable office jobs, can you ask for flexible working or compressed hours? If you can both work 4 days a week (or 9 days a fortnight) you can minimise childcare required. It needs one parent to start early and one to work late so that you can cover opposite ends of the nursery drop off/collection.

To answer a few questions (I'm not answering those I've already answered in previous comment)

• we have been looking for higher paying jobs for ages, if it was as simple as 'earn more' then we would do that regardless of children. Most of our friends are on similar salaries, some have one person in the couple earning a lot more.

• mat leave, I get 6 weeks full pay then SMP. DP gets 2 weeks full pay then back to work.

• the energy bill - we have been fighting this for ages, watching the smart meter etc, it seems that all the appliances in our house must just be very inefficient and the house isn't as well insulated as the EPC suggested. We cook every day and that's a good bit of the electric, the shower seems to eat electric, wfh pushes up the electric. We splurged on having the heating on at 18 throughout December and the gas bill for that month was £250 (and the electric was the usual £120). Again, all our friends are paying similar.

• people saying we will make it work, we'll we are weighing up whether or not to have children, and whether we can actually afford it comes into that. We have both agreed we are not rushing into having children if the maths shows that it's not financially viable. Although there's been a lot of useful comments on this thread (thank you), it still seems like our best bet is to wait and try to improve finances for a couple of years and see where we are.

I agree with this.

Just go for it and you will make it work.

You just do 🤷🏻‍♀️ I don’t know how else to explain it really other than you just adapt your life and finances around having this child. My eldest is 10 and my youngest is 14 months. In that time we’ve done a combination of both of us being FT, one FT one PT, one FT and overtime and one SAHP, FT nursery, PT nursery, grandparent help (not an option for us anymore) before and after school club, WFH, flexible working…honestly over the years as they grow we are just constantly adapting our working lives to benefit the family.

So tax avoidance. Yeh ok...

'I always used the work loos before I came home to save on loo paper. '

Is that a joke?

It depends how much you want children I would say op. I was in a similar position to you, same wage, same age etc I was more in the no children category but the money situation was a big factor, I didn't want to give up my luxuries, nice holidays etc for a child just so we could scrape by, so we decided not to have any and I don't regret it one bit. We have two lovely big holidays booked this year, we are in the process of buying a bigger house, we just wouldn't be able to do that on our wages if we had a child in the mix. Best of luck for whatever you choose.

What’s your maternity pay like? A childminder is likely cheaper than nursery btw!

You say you're on the fence about DC, so could it be that you just don't really want it? Families find a way to make it work, you just cut your cloth to suit.

We saved hard in advance, both working 2nd jobs and cancelled all subscriptions etc - this helped us a bit.

I strongly recommend though that you rethink the SAHP option as you don't seem to be married - be careful about your own financial security.