AIBU to think we can afford 3 kids?

[wonderfulthingabouttiggersis]

Have have no village
both work ft combined earn shy of 120k
FT nursery is about £70 a for a 4 day week (that with the 30hrs, it’s how much they charge now) term time, outside is £60 a day.
4 bed house but a small new build one
already have a 7 seater
decent prospects are work. Both work 9/10
id have to go back FT
love our holidays but do hunt for a bargain
we don’t live in our forever home, will likely upsize when DM sells her home and move to a larger place with an annex for parents.
only way our mortgage will go is down (we’re On a high rate rn .14% about BBR

after tax and deductions (health and protection and pensions) we get just over 6.2k a month)
dh and I both want another BUT he thinks we can’t afford it.
All monthly except childcare and that’s difficult to work out monthly due to funding and term time contracts.
mortgage -£1200
protection £50
childcare- £180 a week but that will go down in January to £100
gas/ electric £130
council tax £150
phones £50
internet £40
food £500
subscriptions £20
credit card £100
we save £50 a month each and will start reclaiming child benefit to save that for them.

MN your straight talking.

AIBU to think he’s being over cautious and financially we’re ok financially

I switched off at this point:

both work ft combined earn shy of 120k

Plus only saving £50 a month on your salaries is crazy. You could afford another 5 kids I'm sure.

You will be fine

I think you’ll be fine

That’s for each of ours kids in their own investment, on top of any adhoc birthday/ c mas money they get, and soon to be child benefit.

we save between us separately too

I’m sorry I’m not sure I follow your spending, you have 6k coming in but your expenses listed out don’t come to anywhere near that though you only save £50?

Have you included all other costs including petrol, car tax, car insurance, house and life insurance, Eating out / drinks, birthday parties, presents, Christmas, days out, house and car repairs, clothes, dentist, hair and beauty etc etc. maybe this is why your husband is saying no as the rest is spent on these extra items (which add up to so much in our house!!)

We earn 40k less than you, Just two but are comfortable on that income you will most certainly be fine 🙂 I think your earnings are great we would be rolling in it if we had that so many families have three or four dependant and survive on so much less.

Sorry that’s per child each. We save each from basically the left over from our salary which depending on the month can be £300/ 400 each.

car insurance, yes I forgot that! And petrol, we spend £100 a month on fuel. Insurance is £400 a year for one car and the other is a BiK so deducted.
LI is in protection and also through work.
days out we spend about £100 a month and the rest we spend from the personal allowance we give ourselves.
dentist for the kids is free

If your joint take home income is £6,200 and your mortgage is £1200, then on the face of it you can certainly afford another child.

But you don't seem to have a full grasp on your household costs. Surely it would make sense to create a budget which details all of your costs (decorating the house, car maintenance, holidays, school uniform, gifts, utilities, gym membership, scouts membership, haircuts, prescriptions, total savings, boiler repairs ..... etc).

Where do you live? I think you can afford it easily but I suppose it would be different if you were in central London. Your council tax is really cheap so that is confusing me (we are paying £200pm for a small 3 bed end terrace).

I meant we put away £50 per child each and will start reclaiming CB and put that away for them too. I meant to say each child.

not sure why the intrinsic distrust. Sometimes we save a bit more, sometimes a bit less

On paper it looks like you have loads left (sounds like up to 1k a month is saved at the mo), so I guess all depends on whether you will have x2 sets of childcare fees at the same time, what your maternity pay is like, if you need to save more for longer term costs like cars/ uni etc.

I would speak to your partner and ask him more specifics about what he’s worried about. You could both subscribe to an app likeYNAB or Snoop to have greater clarity on spending and savings etc if that would reassure him. For us the thought of a 3rd is a generally scary prospect, financially but also logistically (even though high earner income) and would have a massive impact on our life and maybe he just doesn’t want that

You can obviously afford it. You already have the space and car. You’re not going to lose your house. It’s just what you’re willing to sacrifice.

We get prescriptions through work, haircuts adhoc spend out of our personal allowance, don’t have any membership, any home improvements we do through our savings. Boiler we have insurance for it. Clothes including uniforms we’ve not budgeted as we just spend on an advice basis, likewise with car. That would just be a month we save less.

i think a full budget though with all these things would be a powerful tool, those are the costs that creep up! Good idea just in general

Because we just save whatever is left over and that’s normally £300-£400 each, this month is was £361 for me but we had a weekend away

🙄 helpful.

It’s £160 according to dh, it just went up. We live in the midlands

Gonna shove my tin hat on..

Time is also needed...
Will you have the hours to spend quality time together.

Easy way to check - in addition to your savings (which seem rather small compared to your salary so your "extras" are clearly quite high) start saving additional nursery fees that you would need for the third child plus extra allowance for clothes, food, diapers etc each month. If you can still have a lifestyle you want after you put all this money away each month, then you can afford the third. If it pinches you too much, you can't.
I estimate, you probably need to save well in excess of 1,5k between you from now on as you won't have 30h free to play with for some time. And you are not even half way to this target currently.

I don’t think you can afford 3 kids.

I mean you could, but with such an ad hoc approach to budgeting I don’t think you can.

If we had another the youngest would be in nursery school/ reception.

so worst case scenario our bill would be £170- the same that is is now. If in nursery school, if reception it would be about £110. The 30 funded hrs are coming in for children from 9 months next September. Labour have said they’ll do a review into childcare but won’t be removing it.

how do you get to £1.5k a month?

clothes we have plenty, we have one of each, likewise we cloth nappy, so that outlay has already been paid. But surely you can’t mean, £1.5k a month for nappies and baby clothes?