How to Afford a Second Child?

[MiniLob]

My husband (late 40s) and I (late 30s) have one child and have been discussing a second but I'm not sure how we might afford it. We earn roughly the same, bringing home c.£3,400 and c.£3,300 per month (so £6,700 in total).

Our outgoings are:
£2,800 - mortgage
£340 - council tax
£300 - gas and electric
£100 - water
£700 - housekeeping (food, toiletries, bank account fee, window cleaning, any items we need for the house)
£600 - cars (fuel, repairs, tax, MOT, insurance for two cars, train fares)
£100 - nursery
£15 - TV licence
£83 - Virgin broadband and TV
£18 - Spotify
£13 - Netflix
£13 - National Trust
£3.50 - Woodland Trust
£3 - insurance for TV
£50 - home insurance (we set this aside to pay annually but it doesn't actually cover the full amount)
£40 - football for little one
Total: £5,178.50

Then we put aside:
£200 - holiday
£100 - savings for little one
£100 - clothes (for all 3 of us - husband gets through at least one suit and one wear of work shoes per year which eats into the budget quite a lot)
£100 - presents and Christmas (we spend £30-£40 per family member on birthdays and £75-£100 per family household at Christmas, £15 on Mother's Day/Father's Day, up to £100 on little one's birthday, then a main Christmas present and a stocking for little one at Christmas (probably up to £300 in total) - the budget also covers any other birthdays we have to buy presents for, as well as the cost of Christmas dinner and hosting over Christmas)
£100 - "fun money" in case we're invited to do something with family / friends or go to visit / stay with family or friends
£500 - me (personal money - charity contributions, mobile phone, gym / sports, alcohol, birthday / Christmas/ Father's Day gifts for hubby, basically anything that doesn't come from one of the other budgets, savings - I tend to try to put £200 aside each month in savings, donate £50 to charity and spend £250)
£500 - husband (personal money, as above, though I think his charity contributions are more than mine)
Total: £1,600

Total outgoings: c.£6,778.50

If I was to take maternity leave, I would receive full pay for 3 months, half pay for 3 months, statutory pay for 3 months and nothing for 3 months.

First 3 months: no issue
Second 3 months: £4,950 short
Third 3 months (assuming 13 weeks): £7,466.66 short
Fourth 3 months: £9,990 short

Total shortfall: £22,316.66

I would be able to use my accrued annual leave to receive a month of pay, so that would bring the shortfall down to £19,016.66.

We could obviously cut the holiday savings for that year, bringing down the shortfall to £16,616.66.

We could also ditch the "fun money", bringing the shortfall down further to £15,416.66.

We could reduce our personal money by £150 each per month, so £300 less each month, a further reduction in the shortfall to £13,016.66.

I think we'd struggle to cut down by any more. It also doesn't account for having to buy baby things (for example new car seats - the current ones we have for the little one were £650 each and we have two of them, but he'll still be in them for a few years so we can't hand them down - furniture for the baby's bedroom, clothes).

We don't have any savings.

So, any suggestions on how we can go about finding £13k to be able to afford a second child? Obviously, time is of the essence, given our respective ages!

I think your main issue is your mortgage, really high. Unless you're close to paying this off, I'd downsize.

1. Are you close to paying off mortgage?
2. Why do you have no savings?!

Shopping at Aldi and clearing up at Tesco would save you a fortune. Also ditching the subscriptions and holiday for this year.

Your monthly outgoings reads to me like you haven't re-evaluated your budgets since getting your "forever" home.

Of your current take home pay you are spending ~half of it on your mortgage and essential bills followed by almost quarter of your take home pay on day to day living costs. In total your life in this home it taking. £4800 or 72% of your take home pay. Tinkering with this costs, dropping netflix /virgin, switching energy provider are only going to make small changes. You could possibly save £3-400 a month but this would only drop living costs to 67% of your take home pay.

£4800 is £57600 per annum, your partner's take home pay is £40,800 leaving a deficit of £16800 which I believe should be covered by your pay on maternity leave especially if you have a month of annual leave - you will need to recalculate your take home pay for this 12 month period as your take home pay doesn't drop proportionally with a drop on gross salary as you will be paying tax on less of your income. I make your gross pay dropping from c£50k to £21k for 12 months without use of holiday entitlement. This would give you around £18k take home during maternity leave and would mean all of your day to day living costs are covered with a bit of wiggle room.

It is the other £1900 you need to really dig into the detail and recheck priorities - there is nearly £25k a year here with poor visibility about where it is going and I think you need to reassess these priorities not just for if you have a second child but also if you don't. Nearly three quarters of your combined salaries are going on day to day living and you don't really have any savings. What would happen if one of you fell ill and couldn't work or got made redundant? It's recommended that you have 3 months of bills in savings as a safety net. You would need ~£15k for your absolute essentials, you have £6k already which would last you about 1 month if in the worst case scenario of you both being unable to work or 4 months if one of you did but if you include the other £1900 which isn't really currently accounted for it would last you less than a month if both of you were out of work and 2 months for just one of you. I would really go through this spending very carefully and reassess what are reasonable costs. Spend 4-6 months focussing on savings as much of this £1900 as possible. If you could put aside £1200 into savings you could go from £6k savings to £13k. If you could do £1500 a month it could get to the £15k marker for 3 months essential bills covered a month.

It would also be a useful exercise in working out where your red lines on spending are. What are you doing out of habit without the extra enjoyment and which are the things that make your life more enjoyable. I would pay close attention to what are you extra costs per month from being unable to pay for things annually. If I had a mortgage of £2800 a month and I was struggling to find the cash to buy an annual prescription at £114 a month I would be worried.

I'd re-evaluate your driving too if you are often having to replace tyres and repair alloys. We live on the edge of the peaks and we are in some small country lanes that are in awful conditions, not helped by the primary routes being closed for over a year and the diversions are on roads not as well maintained. There are stretches where it is less holes and more continuous gulley. There are holes that are 6 inches deep to navigate around. The road has been dropped from a 60 to a 30 because of it's condition and at that speed it's much easier to avoid damage.

For comparison, we were on a combined income £100k in 2024 when we decided to have our second. All of our living costs camed to about £2500 a month (take home pay ~£6k) 6 months later after 2 miscarriages I found myself out of work (redundancy with just over 3 weeks from the announcement of job losses to my last day) and pregnant on the same day. I haven't worked for the last year and we are now living on one salary and I don't need to go back to work if I don't want to. My partner had a promotion a few weeks before I lost my job. His take home pay is £3500 and our monthly out goings are £1600 and there is another £500 set aside for annual costs such as car insurance. Leaving £1400 for nice to haves and savings. I'm on maternity allowance at the moment and we are saving £600 into regular savers, £100 into my pension, £100 into the children's savings accounts.

We go with the approach of living carefully day to day which means there is the flex in the budget for days out without having to account for them. It meant that in the half term just gone that I didn't have to check the finances to see if we could go to the trampoline park with my daughters friend (£20 entry plus £7 for coffee, juice and snacks), go to the big library in the nearest town rather than our small village library followed by coffee and cake at a cafe. (£3 parking plus £10 in the cafe) and then a trip to the city to go to a museum followed by lunch out (£6 parking, £30 entrance fees, £40-50 for pub lunch). I known that our lifestyle means I can say yes more often to the days that matter more. Our household income before we both qualified in our professions was £25k (household not per person!) and it was hard and when you do have money after living like that you do want to make some changes but it's important to look at what the difference it makes to you. My partner pays for Spotify, I don't mind the ads. I pay for a pilates class he is quite happy doing things at home without the cost. When you go through the costs for your personal spend look at what it is adding to your life and if that annual cost is worth it. Useful multipliers for converting regular costs to annual are 365 (daily) 250 (5 days a week), 150 (3 days a week), 52 (weekly), 12/13 (monthly/4 weekly) and 4 quarterly.

I think the bottom line is your mortgage is absolutely huge- the best part of one persons income. Ultimately, you’ve sort of prioritised the house over a second child as with the mortgage it’s left you tight. I have exactly the same income, same split with DP too, but our mortgage is £1.5k lower- we feel like we have loads of money.

Practically speaking, I’d just let the £13k go onto an interest free credit card then reduce spending to pay it back once baby is here. That’s what I did for mat leave. And sell anything you don’t need.

we spend £800 a month for all food, petrol and household essentials and £800 a month for everything else and that’s with 2 kids, your monthly spend seems really high. People have suggested some ways to cut down already but ultimately you are going to struggle with such a massive mortgage. But at the end of the day you’ve got a lot of income to play around with, you’ve just got to play about with it until the numbers work. I’ve made hundreds of spreadsheets to test different scenarios, you will be able to afford it you just need to take into account the mortgage which is a bit of a killer.

I cannot begin to imagine what that day must have been like for you! Talk about timing. It sounds as though things have worked out really well in the end, though - I'm glad for you.

When we first went in for the house (over 2 years ago) my husband was working full-time. He only dropped to part-time recently because of the effect work had on him (it was either that or leave the profession and find something else but that would have meant working full-time for less money than he earns on 4 days, by the time childcare costs would be accounted for). That was £400 per month (maybe more?), overnight, that we lost (that was what I had been intending we would save) just as the house purchase went through (after 18 months of buying it).

I didn't want any extra burden on him so I said that, basically, yes we could afford for him to drop a day and still buy the house. And we can afford it. It's just the maternity year that would be difficult.

I'm considering whether upping my hours to 4.5 days in 4 might be doable to try to help with the shortfall.

Money is a very difficult subject because my husband is ultimately haunted by past experiences. I manage everything but we discuss it all and, ultimately, we've come to an agreed budget (on which we've both made compromises).

We also anticipate that my salary will go up significantly in years to come so it feels like a kind of holding pattern for the next 4-5 years.

I'm basically in a position where I don't want to push a conversation about going for a second child before I have a solution to the financial side of things. As much as financial decisions are joint decisions, my husband has this idea that "it'll be fine" because I've spent years putting loads aside and keeping our spending in check so we could just find whatever we needed to (we were overpaying our previous mortgage by so much that it was going to be paid off in 2.5 years, instead of the 23 that was on the term).

Just a quick one on the driving - it's not just us, it's happening to all our family and friends in the area, too. One relative went to get a tyre sorted and they found all four alloys had buckled. The lanes, at night, when it's wet are dreadful to navigate. There was a place near to us that had 150 people burst a tyre in a single weekend because of a single pot hole.

I don’t think you really want a second child.

also the window cleaner makes me laugh. We haven’t had one in 6 years. Have been to the gym in 6 years: don’t buy new clothes. Get an annual hair cut. Also I have 3 kids

@MiniLob you need to sit down and have a serious chat with your husband about money. I know you’ve said that you don’t want to burden him but if you explain that it will only be for one year that he stops spending freely, it won’t sound so bad. You can go through the budget together and decide which charities he can give a small amount to and what treats you can both afford. If you both want a second child the sacrifices will be worth making. Part of family life and a successful marriage is being able to have difficult conversations.

You really need a chat with your DH. He has £500 per month to spend but won’t buy himself a shirt?

Does he want a second child? If so he needs to be part of the financial solution - for as long as you try to protect him, indulge him and work around him you’ll never get far. He needs to face financial facts, you both earn well but money isn’t limitless. He needs to cut his cloth, and make savings if you both want a second child. Compromise is necessary, of course, but it sounds like you’re still living on a shoe string while he does his thing and the basics still aren’t being covered. You need a budget, literally take a free trial of YNAB and do a budget where every pound has a job to before it hits the bank.

I think you could afford to have another child but you'd need to make some temp lifestyle changes and it doesn't seem like you're both willing to do that. That's absolutely fine.
I think the bigger issue is your DH reluctance to engage/be hands on with finances.

Yes it was a day of mixed emotions but I would take the cut in lifestyle for my son any day. My daughter has massively benefited from me being at home too. She coped amazingly at nursery but has found school challenging. She would struggle if I went back to work full time. Children need more support - time and finances as they get older not less!

The roads I am driving are the same we are in one of the "red" regions for potholes based on the government website, I know someone that did two tyres at once on a road I drive frequently they had to borrow a tyre from the local garage as she only had one spare. Another person that has had to have a tyre replaced twice in the last 6 months. I also see people every day driving too fast, squeezing through too small a spaces. Many of the roads aren't wide enough for two vehicles but people try anyway and that means they are driving in the crap at the side of the road and where there are more holes. I hold back go around the pot holes and still sit behind them at the next junction so they make very little gain. In the wet I avoid puddles. My partner is doing 15000+ miles a year on these roads and sees so many people driving on these roads too fast for the conditions. Where we are you are looking at a 2h minimum for roadside recovery during which time you block the road which makes it considerably slower than waiting to avoid the puddle or pot hole. We both carry spare wheels and tyre pumps and I have used the pump to rescue a few other people who haven't been equipped.

I think you need to put the idea of a second child to one side for now. You have nearly £2000 a month that you can't properly account for if you keep up like you are there is a good chance that you find things are tight with one child never mind two. Where is it going? You need to sit down with your husband and figure that one out. I understand needing to drop hours for life balance. I had 3 months off sick with severe pnd after having my daughter and could only manage 4 days a week after that but we had a conversation about costs. You can't plan family finances about what you would like it to look like. I'm also concerned about the emotional resilience of the situation. If you are worried about broaching the subject now whilst you are in the lucky position of having two incomes and disposable income how much harder would it be if something happened and you had to reign it in quickly?
I would start the conversation with what can you do to build some savings and an emergency fund and go from there. I understand you want to protect him but he deserves honesty. You can afford him dropping his hours but you are still living as if he hasn't. I think some of the personal spending that comes out of your £500 should be added to household spends. Prescription charges come out for our joint account which we use for living costs. Go through that £1900 what is routine family spending? All of that should be accounted for as part of the housekeeping covers. Basic clothes - t shirts and underwear that sort of thing comes out of household budget too mostly as I tend to either get that in one shop where there is something for me, something for my partner something for the kids and it's just easier that way or it gets added to a supermarket shop. Suits and nicer work clothes come out for our personal budgets.

We have a joint spreadsheet with all the details on it so we both know where we stand without having to bring things up and it means should something happened to one of us the other could manage.

Unless I'm mistaken,by going back to work after 6 months maternity you would earn 3000 per month , but pay 1000 to get baby minded.
That's a profit of 2000, so it would be worth your while returning after 6 months

Unless I'm mistaken,by going back to work after 6 months maternity you would earn 3000 per month , but pay 1000 to get baby minded.
That's a profit of 2000, so it would be worth your while returning after 6 months.
ETA duplicate post

Your husband is a teacher, yes?
I obviously don’t know what your fertility is like, but if it were possibly to choose exactly when you fell pregnant and gave birth….:

If you had a late August baby, your baby could start nursery in September the following year.
You could return to work at the beginning of the summer holidays, thereby reducing your mat leave by 4-6 weeks, but your baby would still be with a parent full time! Ta da! 4-6 weeks funded!

But seriously, if he is a teacher AND you are going to be off for a year (so able to cover the holiday time childcare for a year) would he consider doing a small amount of holiday tutoring? Or exam marking? As a temporary measure of course.

Otherwise, I think it is perfectly possible to fund all of this through a combination of measures. I know you’ve been a little scathing of some of the suggestions - eg Netflix is “only” saving £200 over a year, however, if your shortfall is £15,000 then every £150 saved is 1%. If you gave up Netflix for 18 months, that’s 2% of your budget found. If you and your husband reduced your personal spends by £150 each per month, that’s 2% found for each month you do it. If you started now, and it took you 3 months to fall pregnant, then by the time of the baby’s birth that’s 24% found. Continue that until your return to work and that’s 48%. Window cleaner for a year is another 1%. £10 bill saving a month from now until return to work would be 1.5%. It all adds up.

Car seats are important - explain to family and friends that you have everything you need for a 2nd child EXCEPT car seats and ask for any presents to be vouchers for a retailer that stocks them.

And if you need to borrow a little for the last couple of months, then do. You sound like you really want a second child. As you say, time isn’t on your side. I’d start trying now (saving and conceiving!) and see what happens.

We've just had a second. I had six months paid maternity followed by 3 months statatory and went back when my baby was 10 months. I couldn't afford 3 months of no pay. Depending on when the baby is born you might be entitled to funding at nearer 9/10 months like I was.

It's been hard, I'd rather have had a year off, but in the grand scheme of things it's fine.

We have similar disposable income to you (smaller mortgage but bigger childcare costs) and wouldn't say we particularly struggle. We manage to save every month. But then we certainly aren't speaking 1k+ a month on personal/fun spends either.

This is just a random observation but it's not just the buying of bigger houses that is expensive. It's the maintenance, heating etc of them. E.g. to repaint a big hall costs so much more in paint, time, labour than a smaller or regular size hall. And this translates to most costs...window cleaner costs more, carpets cost more, insulation, electricity etc etc.

It's not just the mortgage.

For the car seats - your toddler will be in the next stage now anyway so you couldnjust get two next stage seats instead of two super expensive all the way through seats. Appreciate again this is just a small
portion of what you have on your list but you need to really scrutinise what you have on your required list as you can’t have it all. But mostly I think you should stick what what you have as you seem to find a lot about your life a bit overwhelming already. Sounds like your house is a massive project in itself.

And absolutely this. We had been super careful to ensure we could afford the mortgage and the utilities - but then we had to renew at a higher rate and had to get new carpets and needed new windows and everything in our current home is double that of our old house so it got a bit tricky for a while. And our house isn’t huge or anything - but it’s bigger than our first house and everything is so much more of a commitment. Plus older kids are always more expensive so we have less wiggle room now than ever before.

You can easily afford a second child. There have been lots of people who have told you how to easily cut and you don't seem to want to (which is perfectly fine).

Your mortgage is insane. Your mortgage is 42% of your costs so the problem was the overextension there preventing you from real savings going forward. Any good financial expert will tell you housing shouldn't exceed 30%. But this is hard for a lot of people with rent being so high in a lot of places but you chose to overspend on a mortgage to buy. You are now unfortunately realising this overexpense.

Your concept of money in terms of saving is strange too - you don't need a window cleaner. You just don't. Car seats for £650 each. That is insane.

You do save which is great - having kids sometimes means this is your 'pay' during mat leave.

This isn't about money. If you want another baby you can easily make it happen. I think you are looking for reasons to not have another.

To be honest, when we took the mortgage, our income was higher. We're also expecting a significant pay-rise in 4-5 years so figured we'd just wait it out. We had to spend a lot doing the house up (and we made our budget go a long way!) but we always knew that would be the case. The value we've added means there's a lot more equity in it, now, which we might lean on in a few years.

I've spoken to my husband (not about a second child but about shifting things around a bit) and we're going to reduce our personal allowances and cut down on gifting which means immediately putting away an extra £300 per month. Our gas, water and electric will all go down in a few months' time because both accounts got messed up by the providers at previous properties so we're paying those off over a long period (so as to minimise the impact on us as it was their mistake). Nursery fees also cease, soon, so that'll be another £100 per month because we won't need wrap around care once the little one is in school. So, yeah, £400 savings per month plus a bit extra when the bills are paid off. I want us to be at £500 as general savings.

The other pots we have are building up but they're meant to be there to cover issues in those areas.

I'm also looking at increasing my hours but sticking with the same working days, so that'll be an extra £400 per month. If I do that, then we'll be able to save £800 per month which will go a long way to the "magic number".

Second child chat will come another day but it's been really helpful reading the comments about overspending and just being generally reckless with money. We never used to be. We managed to save and buy a few properties on really modest incomes. We've just enjoyed the financial freedom since moving. It's been a fun ride but time to reign it in again.