The big benefits headache

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Can anyone help me? I'm hoping to have my first child, but I have a problem. My husband and I are not rich people, we both work 40hours a week. My job doesn't allow for jobshare/or pt hours or any of that, it's 40 hours or nothing, so I want to choose nothing and spend my time for a few years being with my child and not working. I'm stumped with working out how much we would get helpwise on benefits. I've tried the govt calculators and I'm even more stumped . My husband would continue in his job, so we wouldn't be entirely reliant on benefits. My other main issue is, despite as I say we are not rich, we do own our house outright, and we have savings that put us above 20k. This is money saved for varying things, including things like the boiler dying, any major expenses, a car (as my 15 year old car may not be ideal) and general rainy day stuff. I know our savings sound like a lot, but we've both worked since 16 and we are now both late 30s... and weve saved hard . My best guesstimate on the govt sites gave me £20.70 for child benefit and no other help. If this is the case then we can't afford to run the house on my husband's wage alone. I'm literally crying at the moment because i feel so overwhelmed and may have to give up on my baby dream because we can't afford it . Please don't say well £20k is loads of money because that's our basic retirement fund too, as the people's pension and state pension are never going to be enough for us. I'm not the live for today sort of person, I'm a squirreler who worries about tomorrow, and I don't want us to be in a situation where we struggle for basics. Can anyone help me understand what we would get? I can provide figures on dm (if that's a thing on here I've no idea I just joined) for anyone who knows what they are doing, because I sure dont...

Doesn't sound as if you can afford to be a SAHM. Why not look at getting some part-time work in the evenings if you can't make ends meet from your DH's salary alone.

You own a house. You haven't said how much it's worth, but let's guess £100K. So perhaps you have £120K in assets. That makes you richer than the majority of people in this country. Certainly the vast number of those who are renting with few assets would consider somebody with this much money to be very wealthy. So go ahead and be a SAHM if you like but I think that you should at least try and fund it yourself.

And yes, you've paid into the system, but unless you're on a very high wage (I think more than 35K) you've most likely already taken out more than you've paid in even without claiming anything directly.

Everyone knows that savings do affect a lot of benefits. That's the rule. And although I can see why some folk might think it's unfair you can't have people with a hefty amount of savings claiming state help which comes from the taxes on working people. Some of whom aren't on a high wage themselves. Part-time evening job is the answer. You won't beat the system no matter how unfair it appears to be.