Baby budget - any tips?

[SWtoSEGirl]

We're planning on having a baby in the next year or so - both me & DH are both full time employed & I'd like to take a year off (or do shared parental leave) we both get paid exactly the same.

My question is - how much did you aim to save before having a baby? I have necessary outgoings of £1,000 a month - my share of mortgage, council tax, phone bill, life insurance etc.

My employer offers 4 months at 90% pay - then (I think) I can add my holiday into the equation too. Ideally I'd love to save enough to bolster this pay up to my post tax earnings for a year - by my calculations I need to save £15k. Does this sound like a reasonable sum before having a baby? Can I ask what anyone else tried to save?

Any advice much appreciated!

Hi

I would aim to save a bit to cover necessary outgoings. But remember you won't have travel costs to work or lunches etc.

I tried to pick up things for baby when I saw them on sale or on deal, like asda is doing a baby event this now. That saved spending money on maternity leave.

We will have saved £10000 by the time I go off.. I would have ideally saved more but also been paying off my car. However I won't be going back to work after as won't be worTh it, will be supplementing my mat pay with tutoring etc when I can :)

I saved around 4 months salary just to top up the mat pay

I'd say it depends upon your individual situation. I'm the lower earner in our family and my dh earns enough to cover out essential outgoings but we then have little to spend on optional things such as eating out, new clothes etc so that's what my part time salary is spent on. I know you're not in the same situation but as a pp said, you'll have no travel to work costs, no lunchtime trips to expensive sandwich shops etc. Before maternity leave I probably saved about £1000 but I don't think we needed it. Those first 3-4 months were so inexpensive, other than a private baby massage class, nappies and wipes I didn't really spend anything so saved that salary towards the final few months when I had no mat pay. If your factoring in trips out for coffee and socialising in your sums then deduct a fair bit, I am quite frugal anyway but mat leave is the year where I spent less money than ever before. It's now that dd is two that I'm realising just how expensive children are

Thank you for your thoughts! And that's a very interesting perspective Muddlingthrough - I guess I've just heard so many people lament their money situation once a baby comes along.

I also didn't factor in my capacity to save during the initial 4 months of mat leave - so maybe we can start trying a bit sooner - exciting! ☺

My employer offers 4 months at 90% pay

Check your employers maternity pay policy - for most, the 90%/full pay (whatever the enhanced bit is) will be based on your average weekly earnings over a set 'qualifying' period - typically the two months paydays directly before you're 25 weeks pregnant.

So basically, whatever your average gross earnings are in this period is what your employer uses as the figure - and overtime, bonuses etc are usually included.

I'm due dc3 in May. My usual salary is about £1800 gross a month. During my qualifying period (the two paydays) I absolutely smashed in overtime, to a level I would never normally do - life just pretty much stopped for 8 weeks and it was fairly grim. With a result that for those two paydays, my gross pay was up by £1350 a month - roughly £1k net.

Anyway, it's not only nice to have that extra £1k a month for two consecutive pay days, but now I will have £1k extra a month for every month of my enhanced maternity pay (5 months full paid) - so i've gained £5k over my leave period which will see us through when my wages drop to statutory.

Hope that makes sense - anyway, it's well worth looking into, bumping up your pay during the qualifying period is so worth doing if you can but something not many people seem to know about or do!