Finance and Your New Baby
Whether your baby is planned for or not, it’s soon going to dawn on you that this little mouth is not going to be the cheapest thing in your life that you have encountered so far. In fact it has been calculated that during the average portion of your lifetime that little bundle of fun is going to set you back something in the region of the same amount of money as you would spend on a luxury car…per child! Yes, that is over a 18(ish) year period, but a significant amount of that money is going to be spent in the first few pre-school years.
Nappies aren’t the only expense! If you are lucky enough that breast feeding is an option then apart from your own bodily needs food is the least of your worries, however for many parents formula is another surprising cost when you move from two mouths to more. And if you decide that you want to ‘decorate the nursery’ and all of those other hundreds of little expenses they soon add up to a great big expense.
It’s at this point that every sensible parent or parent-to-be realises that budgeting isn’t something that boring old people do, and when you saw your parents sitting down with the bank book it wasn’t because they enjoyed looking at numbers! If you are going to give your family a good start and a safe and reliable income then you need to make sure that at no point are you over-reaching yourself, and that providing for them is a pleasure and not a pain. You need to set aside money for the unexpected. You need to budget the food allowance each week. And you certainly need to consider what is coming around the corner.
You could do worse than consider your home accounting skills. Don’t leave it until you are faced with the unexpected bills to get a handle on your money, instead wade in now and take control. Get used to what the money situation looks like, and then start to make some wise decisions. And as they say, all your troubles will, hopefully, simply be your little ones.
The writer of this article is Andrew Gray, who is a writer, artist, and has a fascination with road bike cycling, and writing about it.