We had no money when Kid Kalhoun was born. We borrowed a cradle, received a crib as a gift, and warmed bottles in a pan of water. He wore hand-me-downs for the most part. Formula and diapers were the only expense. I worked evenings so we didn’t have child care expenses for the first couple years. You CAN spend a ton of money on a baby, but you don’t have to.
What I’ve read and been told in terms of breastfeeding is that a breastfed baby should have between 6 and 8 wet diapers a day to make sure they aren’t dehydrated. It’s probably different with formula babies, though.
As far as spending money, we haven’t spent a ton of money getting ready for this baby, but I’ll admit, if ElzaHub hadn’t been laid off, we’d probably be spending a bit more. As it is, this kid has more clothes than I’ll be able to put him in, probably, and I’ve bought one outfit from Target and a lot from eBay for $25 - the rest has been given to us either at the shower, or as hand-me-downs from my yard-saling-crazy aunt or my sister-in-law, as my nephew’s just outgrown everything she’s given us. My parents have given us a crib and dresser/changing table as a gift, and thanks to my insanely generous family and friends, we pretty much received everything we needed at our shower. We don’t technically need anything else, but there are a few things I would classify as wants (which won’t be fulfilled until ElzaHub is gainfully employed again).
I do plan to breastfeed to save some money, but due to prior surgery, I will more than likely need to supplement with formula, so that’s an expense we really can’t avoid. Not working isn’t an option, so we will be spending money on daycare - we’ve got our choices between some fairly expensive centers (that seem to run between $650 and $800 a month for full-time care), or home daycares, that are around $250 - $500 a month. I have no problems going with a home daycare, but making sure that the caregiver is CPR/First Aid certified is where I have to cut several of them off of my list - I will not leave my child with someone who doesn’t have up-to-date certifications, and that may mean paying a little bit more. Diapers - we’ve stocked up on a number of them through coupons. We’ve also taken some from my brother and SIL, since my nephew outgrew some before he managed to finish the packages.
I don’t think there’s anything WRONG with wanting the extra stuff for baby - provided you’re not going bankrupt to provide it. And I’m sure much of the stuff that these numbers encompass IS extra stuff. Granted, I don’t quite understand the folks who spend $150 a week on Gymboree clothing for their kids (I do know people who spend at least that much or more on Gymboree lines, which are ultra-matchy-matchy), but hey, if they have the money, whatever.
E.
If the packages are an unsophisticated binary choice of “individual” or “family”, and they already have “family” insurance (to cover both of them), the incremental cost is zero.
Well, it’s been 30 years for me, so my memory is kinda fuzzy. He was a formula baby and I remember that he didn’t make a lot of little pees…usually one gigantic one every so often. He was also potty trained at 17 months, which made it really nice, cost-wise.
You have to have worked 600 insured hours (meaning hours during which you have paid into the Employment Insurance program, which is NOT optional) in the 52 weeks or since your last claim.
So, if you give birth on January 1 2006 for example, you have a 2 week waiting period where you get no benefits, this is standard with all Unemployment claims. Then your mat. leave benefits start, and run for 15 weeks. Then you have 35 weeks of Parental Benefits, which you can give to your spouse if you prefer. You are free to go back to work after the 15 weeks of mat. leave.
If in that same year, you get pregnant on say, May 1 (yikes!) and the due date is February 1 2007, you need to go off of the Parental benefits and get back to work in time to work those 600 insured hours, in order to qualify for another maternity leave.
I believe that most companies though have a policy on any top-ups they will pay. For example, they may top up your benefits for the first 5 months of that first pregnancy, but then they may not top up if you get pregnant again unless you have been back at work for at least a year. That is each company’s choice depending on their policies - many companies don’t top up your Mat. Leave or Parental Leave benefits at all.
Long-winded answer, hope it makes some sense. We are very lucky here I believe.
I think that is mainly a guideline for new babies, so that breastfeeding moms have some gauge to use in order to ensure their young baby is getting enough nutrition and fluids.
Moms of formula babies can SEE how much their baby is getting, so it is less of a concern for them.
My DD is 9 months old and I wouldn’t say she always has 6 wet diapers a day.
My husband and I are honestly puzzled by these figures. We aren’t crazy-crunchies, but we did make some decisions deemed ‘out there’ by our mainstream friends and family, yet we’ve managed to remain pretty mainstream ourselves and I doubt anyone would be able to finger our children as the ones raised on air relative to the ones raised on $20K over the first year. Let me just highlight the word ‘choice’ at this point. Of course everyone is entitled to make their own choices, but we need to be honest about the consequences attached.
We never bought formula or baby food. Our children nursed exclusively until they were old enough to grab food off my plate and then were provided with servings of our food mashed, pureed, or appropriately cut up. I realize that, for a variety of reasons, this isn’t a viable choice for some parents, but the savings are pretty impressive and deserve a prominent place in any discussion about the cost of having children. It’s not the baby that’s expensive, it’s the things we do that cost so much.
We used cloth diapers at an initial investement of around $500 and purchased a front loader to drastically cut on the cost of hot water. Granted, one could say that our baby cost of $3k in appliances, but I refute that with the argument that my washer still works for the family long after the last is out of diapers and I can reasonably assume it will still be saving us money when the kids bring their clothes home from college.
Conventional diaper rash was never an issue for us, but we did battle with a fungus with the power to render a perfect butt into a startling mass of angry red boils in seconds flat. This may be the rash other cloth users refer to. I found that regular application of tea tree oil in a simple-to-make balm did the trick for pennies.
We chose to give up an income. Mine. Partly because I made a third of my husband’s salary, partly because I had the boobs. We agree that this was an economically sound decision as I have been able to save the family far more than my teaching salary in ways related to the children (see above) and in other ways as well.
We don’t buy new clothes. Ever. Aside from socks and undies, all our family’s clothes are bought at second-hand and consignment type stores. Our taste for fine garments would quickly outstrip our ability to pay for them, so we buy them used at a cost much less than the cheap, poorly-made clothes one finds in discount stores. I spend about $30 per family member each season on clothes.
I had a hickory co-sleeper made for about $200. That worked for the first year. Then we bought a convertable crib for about $300. It will serve as a daybed in the kid’s room for the duration of their stay here…
I wore both the babies until about 1 year of age in a Maya Wrap ($30) dispensing with the need for mulitple strollers for various stages of growth.
Our jogging stroller cost $90 bucks 6 years ago. I spent $30 to replace the fabric for baby #2.
Add in carseats ($150) and doctor co-pays, and I believe that most people could, without too much effort, bring a baby in for under $2K.
And yes, Dr. Phil is a moron.
Yup, we did the white trim & blinds too … eerie. But now I know you’re not my wife, even though we’re in the same province … she knows I can’t get off the computer right now, since someone is paying me to be here. 
Hmm … looks like the big difference was the up the back thing. We had much less up the back with disposables than cloth. Then the outfits would get discolored, maybe it was our kid, but no matter how many times we washed those diapershirts, they still were still a brownish yellow. YMMV obviously, but we just didn’t feel we were saving much money for the amount of time we spend doing laundry as a result.
In regards to the rest, it seems that it is definatly possible to spend that kinda money, but it is by no means required. Babies go through stuff so fast that it’s really easy with minimal effort to find used items almost as good as new, and a lot of things can be jury-rigged from other things. Also, if you’ve got family around, you will probably end up with more stuff than you wanted in the first place.
I had a nice “little” explanation of canadian mat/parental leave, but on preview I saw Stainz beat me to it. Just a few things she missed … a woman can start taking mat leave up to eight weeks before the due date or within 17 weeks of the birth, but there is still the two-week waiting period. Parental leave starts with the birth. But if both parents split the parental benefits, only one of them has to go through the waiting period. There is also a fifteen week sickness benefits that you can get if due to your pregnancy you are unable to work. This would mean you can get up to 65 weeks of benefits.
You recieve 55% of your wages, up to $413 a week, plus the family suppliment for low-income families. (which applies to all EI benefits) This is taxable income, but they didn’t deduct enough in our case, which caused us tax problems. I’ve heard they’ve changed that, but it’s something to watch for.
There’s a bit more to it than that, but that’s what I can remember off the top of my head. We only went through this once, since our kids were too close together for my wife to work the required hours. We didn’t want to take the income hit for me to take parental leave with number two and three, though I did take four weeks with the first one. All in all, I think it’s a great system, and it’s one of the reasons I love this country.
It’s the newborns that have 8 or more diapers per day, as they get older you can change them less. Now that my son is 2 we only change him about 4 times a day but I remember changing him 8-10 times when he was fed every 2 hours. And once they start sleeping through the night you change them less.
I noticed as he grew into bigger diaper sizes, as the sizes go up you pay the same for the package but you get fewer diapers in the bigger sizes packages. However, the number of diapers the child uses per day goes down along with that, so you end up buying about the same number of packages anyway. If that makes sense.
I agree that you can have a baby pretty cheaply, but I don’t think people should necessarily plan on it being cheap. Sure there are things you can do like buy second hand items, but the really big expenses are usually the ones you can’t plan for, like medical bills.
My husband got laid off last week and buying our own medical insurance for our family is something I am looking into. It is reasonable for a healthy family, but once you add a pregnancy rider the cost skyrockets, to the point of it being ridiculous. But even with his very good insurance before we would have had to pay a minimum of $800 for a normal, complication-free birth.
I believe that estimate may very well be a real average. That doesn’t mean people don’t do it for less, but for many it also ends up being more. You should at least know what can happen if you are planning on having a baby with little or no disposable income.
This “wet diapers a day” thing confused me too. The recommendation in 1993, when WhyKid was born was that the baby have at least 8 wet diapers a day. In 2005, when WhyBaby was born, it was suddenly 5-6 wet diapers a day.
My father, a (now retired) research fellow for one of the big absorbent materials manufacturers, shed light on the subject for me: Prior to the late 80’s, diapers were either cloth or wood pulp (sometimes called “paper pulp”.) In the late 80’s, the first super-absorbent diapers came out, which included chemical crystals which hold up to 600X their own weight in urine. These diapers are thinner and much more absorbent than the old pulp diapers. They also “wick” liquid away from the surface, reducing diaper rash in most babies. Within 10 years, all the diapers on the market (save two brands of “natural” diapers) were super-absorbents.
The old “at least 8 diapers a day” recommendation was for cloth and wood pulp diapers, which don’t absorb as much and need to be changed more often. 5-6 diapers is more realistic for the super-absorbents of today.
Not including birth costs, WhyBaby is pretty cheap, thanks to hand-me-downs and thrift stores. We did splurge with a $300 crib and armoire combo from Super K-Mart, but technically that was after she was a year old. Before that, she slept in our room in an Amby motion bed, and all her clothes were on 10 cent hangers in the closet.
One thought on formula cost: COSTCO! I can get **two **of the huge, doublesized cans of formula there for under $20. I can’t believe that the little name brands ones cost double or even more.
**Including **birth costs, she cost us and the insurance company well over half a million. That’s what happens when you’re 4 months early and need 3 and a half months in intensive care. And she was as healthy as a micropreemie can be: no surgeries or major interventions. She just needed a ventilator for a long time and a couple of blood transfusions. It could have been far worse. Still, I don’t think parents should have to plan for such a catastrophe: if they did, only the rich folks would have babies at all. There are plenty of social services (and insurance) to cover the most extreme "what-if"s.
i would like to say that our stats for the cost of a preemie baby ranks in at half a million. Wow.
I agree, that there’s no way to plan for these kind of circumstances. However, if my health care has a deductable or percentage of cost to pay, it does make sense to plan for that possiblility. For example, most likely a birth will go fine and the cost will be minimal, but many plans now give a percentage up to a capped amount that you have to pay if something goes wrong. $3000 is usually a starting point for a plan like this, so it makes sense to at least realize that we may end up shelling that out, because as you know, it doesn’t take long in ICU or neonatal care to spend that much (what, like 5 minutes? )
Plan for the worst, hope for the best and all that. Personally I would be nervous having a baby with no emergency funds in place, I am not saying people don’t do it and sometimes life just happens and you deal with it. I am also not saying only rich people should or can have babies, just that babies can be expensive even with cost-cutting measures. So I don’t think $10,000 is an out of line figure of something that could happen.
What’s funny is that when I got pregnant, we had a fair amount in savings, a nice cushion in our checking, and a good plan for the future. Oddly enough, even with ElzaHub being laid off, we’ve been able to keep most of our savings (our heat sensor broke, necessitating a new one in the dead of winter, taking part of our savings), and keep our cushion around the same place. He’s receiving unemployment, but it’s a good deal less than what he was making - we’ve just cut things in various places and have radically curbed our spending (we haven’t bought a new DVD or non-birth related book since January - a tough one for us).
Without those two things, we’d be screwed, though, and we are starting to feel a little tight as I will be going down to 75% pay for a month of my maternity leave, so if he’s not working by then, we may have to use our cushion and/or savings. Adding the baby to my health insurance is going to be an additional $100 a month. So things will be very tight, but again…thank goodness we had some leeway before I got pregnant.
Of course, should his unemployment run out and he’s still not working…we’re gonna have issues. But I’m trying not to think that far ahead at this point. 
E.
My mum loves to tell the story of how I got potty-trained.
She was a cloth diaper user, and I was a cloth diaper wearer. One day, she decided that she wanted to take me somewhere and was going to make me wear some disposable diapers because she didn’t want a cloth one to get messy. When I informed her at about a year and a half old that I would not wear ‘paper pants’, she told me my choices were paper pants or toilets.
I chose toilets and never looked back.
On the other side of the coin, my sister wore cloth diapers also and refused to be potty trained until she was four.
She used to tell my mum, quite loudly, that she was ‘too busy for that toilet stuff’ and did not have time in her daily schedule of eating quarters and crawling under the couch to learn to use the toilet.
How’s that for an even split?
Good luck to you. I remember how stressed I was at the end of my pregnancy. And now that we are talking about a second baby, my husband lost his job last week too. I would have been really freaking out if I was pregnant already, so I will send calming vibes your way But I admit I am hyper about nesting and babies and must have security, probably more so than most people.
IIRC from other threads you are having some pre-labor signs, no? I had strong braxton-hicks for weeks before I went into labor, it drove me NUTS. Try to stay sane, you’re in the homestretch!
I think that’s the idea behind the new training pants that have the “feel when wet” liners. All they really do is let the kid be uncomfortable when they go, probably much like cloth diapers. Maybe I should switch my son to cloth, get him trained in a jiffy. More work for me though…decisions, decisions.
It sure shows how much kids are in charge of their own destiny, no matter what the parents might think! My daughter is starting to complain about the diaper, but when I give her the alternative (“do you want to go on the potty?”), suddenly the diaper doesn’t seem so bad. She is in this phase of being afraid of things, and she is afraid of the potty for some reason.
My sister and I have been very different our entire lives. I started out, apparently, determined to evaluate the choices before me and choose the more pleasant situation, where she is more likely to just keep doing things the same way rather than change the status quo.
She was the one who would put whatever she found in her mouth in typical baby fashion, and I avoided putting foreign substances in my mouth. She swallowed a lot more spare change than I did.
She was girly, I was a tomboy. She ate with her hands and made a mess, and I demanded a fork, spoon and napkin with my meals.
I was an expensive kid though. Born with severe vision problems (for all intents and purposes my ability to see was so bad that I could do no more than distinguish day from night) and a need to see a pediatric opthalmologist every six weeks for the first five years of my life put a dent in mum and dad. It paid off, since I now have 20/20 vision in both eyes and never did have to have surgery.
That’s the thing - we thought we were being SO prepared by making sure we had money in the bank, secure jobs, etc. when trying to get pregnant - then it happens, and everything else falls apart. 
I’m definitely stressed about it - totally freaked out about whether or not he’s going to find something while I’m on maternity leave, or if we’re going to have to move to Virginia (where the job market’s better and we have my family). I’ve already told him this settles the second child debate because I want one pregnancy where I’m not worrying constantly about finances or the job hunt. (Actually, we wanted a second one anyway, just weren’t 100% sure…now I think we are…we’ll just wait until we’re positive that both of our jobs are 100% secure). I’m sorry to hear about your DH, too - it’s definitely stressful, but hopefully, there are good things down the pike for both of us!
And yep - I’ve actually had contractions off and on for the past week, real ones. I’ve had Braxton Hicks for weeks, though, so there’s definitely a difference. I hit full-term on Saturday, so as long as I make it till then, it’s fair game for him to get here :D.
Catsix, that’s a great story. It really does depend on the kid:).
E.
I think it was already a foregone conclusion years ago that Dr. Phil is a moron. I think the $10,000 figure can be reasonable, however the $22,000 figure is outrageous unless you start counting medical costs and lost income. Then I think both these figures are too low. I keep track of everything in Quicken and added a Baby Expenses category before our daughter was born so I looked them up after seeing this thread. She just turned 2 almost exactly a month ago. Pretty much everything was new but never full price. Here’s how our costs panned out not including medical and lost income.
Total - $6,223 1st year, $11,707 to date (2 yrs, 1 mo)
Clothing ($312, $544) – Some used clothes from a friend of a friend but most new good quality but all on sale. About 50/50 purchased by us or as gifts.
Entertainment ($204, $208) – Something’s off here because I’m sure there are more toys/books that I got her over the last year. More than half of her toys were as gifts.
Furniture ($475, $702) – Everything was new, good quality but on sale. I believe her crib and dresser may have been discontinued items. This also includes a pricey stroller at half price and a cheap one. It seems I also included her last car seat here whereas the first one is below.
Personal Care ($466, $800) – Mainly diapers which once we clued in have all been Sam’s Club Smiles brand. Also includes otc medicine and toiletries. Safety items including her first car seat.
Sheets, Blankets, etc. ($82, $82) – Fairly obvious. I think we also got a couple as gifts.
Breastfeeding, Food ($493, $534) – My wife breastfed for the first 10 months. This includes an electric pump, bottle warmer, bottles etc. Not much was spent on formula since most were free or had large coupon savings. I only tracked baby specific groceries, not regular groceries for everyone.
Daycare ($4,131, $8,778) – Here’s the big expense but it’s still low. My wife took 3 months off work, and my mom came to live with us and watch her until 10 months old when she went into daycare. We paid my mom a few hundred a month and daycare was about $600 a month for a good location. She left daycare at the end of January this year (19 months) when my wife quit work.
Other expenses ($60, $60) – This looks to be pictures and birth certificate.
Medical costs and lost income are not included above. My previous insurance was either single or family so we were already at the family rate. Deductible, copays etc. were about $1500 to $2000 the first year including pregnancy, only a couple hundred or so the last year. The billed costs were probably about $40-$50K.
Lost income for the three months she was on maternity leave was about $20-$25K and about $50K so far this year. This is where it hits us hard. Quitting work wasn’t a choice just for my daughter, her work was emotionally unhealthy (long story) and she can’t work again until I get my permanent residency. Thus helping make the decision to go ahead and have our second child now (we’re having a boy due around Thanksgiving).
The whole pregnancy thing makes me wish I was back in Canada. It was probably mentioned upthread but I probably missed it. The cap that EI pays is pretty low, somewhere around $30K, Of course that’s still better than 3 months with nothing. I have a hard time just trying to take a week or two.