Money and pregnancy

[florencesthoughts]

Hello 👋🏻

My partner and I are hoping to TTC soon but wondered how much money in savings is considered a ‘good starting point’ when planning for a baby? People say to us ‘you just make it work’ and ‘there is never enough money you can save’ BUT what is a good figure on average?

Interested to hear peoples opinions.

It varies so much depending on your situation.

Will you plan to breast feed? Which nappies will you use? Do you care if the nursery furniture is all matching?!

If you have family that can provide free childcare/general support that makes a huge difference.

We spent about £1200 before dc arrived buying kit for our newborn, much of it second hand (pram, cot, car seat, nursery monitor, nursing chair, lots of clothes and toys, all ebay or Facebook)

We were given lots by friends too, who have had young children and that helps hugely.

Other costs - a hypnobirthing course (worth every penny!), then out of the blue a £350 bill to see a paediatric consultant privately when DC was just 1 month old. (NHS referral was too slow, and my googling told me that DC would likely need an operation before 4 months old. Only way to get referral to specialists at Great Ormond St was to pay for an initial private appointment at our local hospital. It’s terrible that we had to game the NHS system that way, but it was the best £350 we ever spent, she is now hopefully v healthy)

So yeah - the general gist of the more money you can save the better, is about right! But if you’re thrifty you can go far with a lot less

There are various levels of preparedness in my opinion and now much you need to save depends on your personal circumstances. Remember that you can save during the pregnancy too

1. Cover costs of baby essentials
2. Cover costs of baby essentials & extra nice to have things baby /antenatal classes
3. Cover the difference between monthly costs and income due to drop in your income
4. Cover difference between your regular income and maternity pay
5. Cover the household running costs for 3 months if you lost your partner or main earner lost their job

Other things to consider would be what savings cushion would you need if any of your white goods needed replacing or if your car needed a repair or replacing.

Agree with others it depends on how much of a buffer in life you need to feel comfortable?

But as a first baby I'd say you need at least £2k to start with for the essentials - pram, Moses basket, cot, sterilisation kits etc. You could of course buy second hand l/find cheaper alternatives
We bought our first pram from Mothercare on interest free finance and now they've gone it's hard finding anywhere I trust to buy a new pram now

Then maternity leave savings depends on what your work package is like? Mine is rubbish - 6 weeks at 90% and 12 weeks at 50% - I'm the main earner and earn 3x DH so will have to go back when my twins are 18 weeks. But I think we ll need around £1500-£2,000 in savings to top my maternity leave up. If you are planning on staying off the full year you'll need a lot more in savings if your DH can't cover the shortfall

Then there is childcare. This time with having twins I've managed to set aside £5k in savings to help pay childminder costs for around 9 months until some other loans are paid off. For full time childcare you are looking at £850 a month minimum for a childminder and a lot more if it's a nursery

I think it’s so variable that asking other people’s opinion really isn’t that helpful. I can’t remember what we saved for 1st baby - if anything. For 3rd and hopefully 4th (I’m 6 wks preg) my husband likes to have £20,000 in accessible savings before I go on mat leave - but that’s because I’m the higher earner. We have most of the big items or borrow from friends so that money is purely to cover the difference in my mat pay vs actual pay and as a buffer in case our roof starts leaking or the car breaks down.

It’s so variable. You really can buy the basics for a baby quite reasonably if you want to and don’t need everything to be perfect, brand new and matching. Prams and car seats vary hugely in price etc.

Honestly, we probably spent about £2000 setting up for the baby but it absolutely isn’t necessary to spend that much. Our costs included a Bugaboo Bee 5 (chosen because it seemed best for public transport in London. There are far cheaper pushchairs) plus a professionally painted mural on the nursery wall (again totally unnecessary but 3 years later, we all still love it so I’m happy with that decision). You’ll quite often get offers of hand me down clothes when you announce you’re pregnancy, plus we’ve been lent the Next2Me crib etc both times (just bought a new mattress).

The biggest expense was saving up in advance to cover the bills when my maternity pay drops. I’m lucky to have an excellent maternity package, but still had to find quite a few £1000s as I wanted to have that money saved up in advance. Others can manage on the partners wage, others dip into savings etc. Really depends how you want to approach it.

To work it out for you

1. Price up the baby basics then decide whether the cost is reasonable to you or where you can cut it back in places
2. Think about maternity pay and bills and how that’ll be covered when pay drops.

I had about 5000 saved for my first two to cover things we needed and to make up part of my loss in pay during mat leave. This time I have nothing saved

May need to get a loan! Particularly as I think we will need a new car.

Thanks everyone! Very interesting to hear. Definitely agree it is variable depending on circumstances and lifestyle etc.

Seems like £2k-£5k is generally the amount people have in mind/first spend. My mat leave is good but nobody to help with childcare so that'll be nice and expensive!! I'm main earner so will need to go back to work and want to. Will keep putting the pennies away.

I think the best thing to do is work out how much you need to make up for the drop in income and then save that. I had about £8k saved for my first that would guarentee our bills could be paid as normal so I could have a year off. I actually lost my job whilst on mat leave so ended up getting a new job and going back around 10.5 months.

This time round I have significantly more, in no small part thanks to covid. We saved a fortune on no nursery fees for our eldest this year and in general not going out etc. I have a stable job to return to which is helpful.

I personally would start with covering the bills. If you can afford extra then start to factor in baby classes, trips out etc. A friend of mine who had a baby who wouldnt sleep well or nap at all really, bought a national trust membership on mat leave so she could spend the day wondering about somewhere outside of her house to calm her baby down! Bit of an extreme example but you get the idea!

We started saving when we started trying. As it took 2 plus years to get pregnant we had a good IVF fund by the end. In the end we didn't need it for IVF so have spent it on redoing our house.

Basically, start saving now and see how much you have by the time a baby arrives

I'm currently pregnant with my first so can't advise from experience, but we're saving up the shortfall in my wage for the time I'll be off plus a couple of extra grand for set up costs/as a buffer. I'll only get SMP for my mat leave so just making sure we can top up to my normal wage every month as although DH earns more than me most of the time, he is freelance (so irregular income) so my salary pays the bills month-to-month and when he brings money in it gets saved or pays for house updates, holidays, etc. But that's what works for us, everyone will be different - we sat down in front of a spreadsheet and figured out what we will need, might be worth doing. Chat to friends/family, too - a lot of mine have said your outgoings will decrease initially as you won't be doing much (which could be especially true depending on restrictions etc) and then think about what you'd like to do during mat leave - we definitely want to make the most of the time and book in some trips etc (whether UK or abroad remains to be seen depending on the situation) so accounting for that, too.

I would just say that whilst it’s wise to make sure you can afford the essentials, don’t leave it too long. These days many leave it until they can afford it and then find that their fertility has dropped hugely and they don’t fall pregnant quickly like they planned.
Also growing up my family were quite hard up and as a family we were way happier than my cousins who had everything.

We thought about how much income we'd lose from maternity leave, plus the cost of nursery (which I had absolutely no idea about, but it's a lot!). We were aiming for 8-10k in savings before having a baby, but had to factor in getting our house re-roofed as well!
We are buying mostly second hand, so will probably only spend a couple of hundred pounds on baby stuff.

We had about £1000 in savings. Husband take home pay was £1500 and I only got SMP from work (no benefits apart from child benefit). It is doable for where we live and I made sacrifices so our family could cope. There's no right or wrong answer but I honestly think we've been able to do it because we have no serious debts. My major regret was not buying enough second hand things. Definitely the smartest move for us was to have at least £1000 saved which we didn't touch although we really came close for some time. My husband grew up extremely poor so it was nothing new for us to go 9 months without buying clothes for ourselves or holidays/luxuries.

I've just been on the Gov website to work everything out as someone suggested.
Looks like I would be entitled to 26 weeks full pay then at 13 weeks it's statutory pay and then anytime after is unpaid.

Will definitely be getting bits second hand and I'm sure there's lots of things people buy that they don't end up using or needing so will read up on that to avoid!

Thinking about this further, how much can you save might be a better question than how much should you save.
Take a look at your finances see what you saved last month then for two months challenge yourselves to see what you can save. Calculate what you would save if you were able to continue that for a year. What position would you be in then?

You might find that in a year you would be in a sensible position (initial baby cost covered and shouldn't leave you short for household costs) if so consider starting to try to conceive.
If not, think about what you could do for an extra 3-6 months to save a bit more before ttc. Unless you very young or in a very poor financial situation I wouldn't delay ttc beyond 6 months, you don't know how long it will take to conceive and what bumps in the road you will come during your conception journey.

Other things to think about is how secure your housing and job situations are, is there anything that you can do to improve that over a 6-12month period.

I have been quite impressed and surprised by how much we have been able to buy second hand and how quickly it comes. We have spent about £1000 since conceiving - to 10 week old this has covered the big items like pram and car seat to baby and maternity /nursing clothes to nct class and baby sensory course. We started with the bare essentials and have added other bits as we have needed them. With online deliveries and click and collect there's not much you can't get within a day or so. We have decided to get a new sling that will go up to toddler age. We found one we like the look of on Sunday, found one on ebay that night, won the bid Monday lunch time, delivery expected tomorrow!

You won’t get 26 weeks full pay unless that’s a benefit that your work provide or if your wages are less than the threshold (£165 I believe?).

We used £6k of our savings as I was on SMP but that included a lifestyle not on a budget. We spent about £3k on the travel system, nursery furniture and other bits and bobs. If we had our baby 5 years ago there’s no way we could afford that though so you basically make it work within your means as much as you can. Try not to worry too much, prepare as much as you can and then just roll with it - as long as the baby is fed, warm and happy and the bills are paid, you’re all good 😊

Sorry yes, that was poorly worded. The gov website did not say 26 weeks full pay. That's an employer benefit I get.

Great responses, all very interesting to hear. Thanks

Haven’t read all the replies but a big factor is whether you can afford to a) take maternity leave and b) pay for childcare when you go back to work, without needing to dip into savings. DH and I are lucky to have fairly well paid jobs and before we had DD our monthly outgoings (mortgage, bills, food etc) was about 2k less than our income. This meant that when I took maternity leave, although we had less spare money, we didn’t need any savings to supplement that as we could cover all our outgoings from DHs wage and my mat pay. And when I went back to work we could afford to pay for childcare. Therefore we didn’t actually need anything in savings per se, as we could afford to live month to month without needing to use savings. We probably spent about £800 getting everything ready, We bought a new buggy but it was heavily discounted and then our car seat and cot were gifts from our parents. I got all her clothes and other baby bits second hand.

But we are in a fortunate position without earnings, so it’s a case of working out whether you can cover outgoings from one wage and if not then you need to save the difference.