How do people manage on smp?

[San2022]

I’ve just been calculating how much I can expect to get whilst on maternity and it has totally freaked me out! when I go on mat leave I will get full pay for 14 weeks then il be put onto smp which I have been told is roughly £156 a week. This will leave me roughly £900 a month short of what I currently earn 😭 and with the cost of living situation not getting any better how are people actually managing to pay their bills? I know I am going to have to consider cutting unnecessary things out which is all part of becoming a parent and taking on that responsibility and I’m fine about that (I don’t live a luxury lifestyle anyway) but I’m not sure that smp will even cover the basics of mortgage and utility bills!

They go back to work earlier

Save in advance.

Have you looked at childcare costs when you return to work

cus this problem of less money each month is gonna go on for a long time !

Full pay for 14 weeks is good! You'll have plenty of opportunity to save during pregnancy and those 14 weeks. Your partner needs to be plugging the shortfall too.

This only works if you own your house, and may well not be a thing now, but we took a mortgage break and just paid interest for 6 months. Youngest child is 11 now though, and I very much appreciate that the economic landscape has changed significantly since.

They don't hose sun's before getting pregnant and save to cover whatever ML they plan or they go back to work early.

FGS. They do those sums....😆

We started preparing for it long before we planned to start a family. For years we overpaid the mortgage as much as we could. Now our outgoings are so low, we still manage to save whilst I'm on SMP.

This is an amount of money not that dissimilar from State Pension. Luckily tho' it only needs to be endured for a limited time period.

True.
Although most pensioners have no mortgage to pay. However in years to come this will change as people either need longer repayment periods or are stuck renting.

Various combinations of:

Save up in advance
Cut outgoings (some of which might happen anyway - eg cost of commute)
Take less time off.

This is probably no help but I saved a full years pay before we started trying. I'm NHS and the higher earner and there's no way we could have lived on SMP

Actually more like half a years pay

I'm the higher earner (on £32k at that time) and we saved £5k in advance to cover our expenses etc. Then, I took only 6 months off (only 6 weeks paid at higher rate, thereafter SMP) and then my DH took the next 6 months as shared parental leave (final 3 months unpaid). It was great for both of us to have a chance to really bond with ds - and as others have said, financially not as crippling as what we had after that, with childcare costs until he started school. I appreciate that many families don't have this kind of setup though.

tldr - save as much as you can beforehand!

@San2022 ot may be worth going on to entitled to.com and doing a calculation to see if you are claiming all the benefits you are entitled to.

also make sure you are factoring your annual leave which you will still be entitled to as well.

I got an insurance payout after a car accident about 10 years ago. I saved it and we didn’t have a kid until I knew I wouldn’t need that money to pay for a house deposit or wedding (so last year).

I used my holiday entitlement for the year at the start of my maternity leave.

Then I got 90% for 6 more weeks.

By the time I got paid for that, daughter was about 4 months.

I lived off savings for the next 4 months. I could actually live quite comfortably but was starting to run out of money towards the end.

I was starting to consider going back to work early when my employer asked me to start working from home a few days a month because my maternity replacement left. I did it because I really needed the money then, even though it just about covered my bills, childcare and food.

I’m now building up my savings again by still working at home for that employer but doing a different job full time. I was also entitled to more holiday pay from the first employer as my maternity crossed two holiday years.

You save when preg and that’s why I went back to work when dd was 17w.

im self employed so none of this 90% fir 6w or any full pay

just 39w of ma which is £156 a week

so I went back to work as earn more in. Day then a week of ma so was a no brainier for me

You plan and do the sums.

When ds was born mat leave was only for 6 months. I got full pay for 12 weeks. I went back to work when ds was 4 months, (very unusually, part time) which was quite normal for anyone with a career 25-30 years ago.

Our sums had identified we could live on DH's salary alone. We were about evens Stevens at that point and had purposefully not maxed out on mortgage.

A day nursery even then was about £700-£800pcm for three days per week.

DS from about 5 months the started being v poorly - asthma triggered by bronchiolitis so I stopped working after about 10 months because I just couldn't be reliable. And due to planning we could cover our bills. It was a tight couple of years even without a huge mortgage. Although of course interest rates were much higher then - probs between 8%-11% post the ERM fiasco.