Final Baby Prep
What’s new in our lives? My best answer to that right now is nothing yet, thank goodness! We have checked a lot of things off the to-do list. We have assembled the baby’s dresser, done baby laundry and started packing hospital bags. I made a trip to Ikea and the Container Store with my mom recently to find storage containers and organizational things for both the baby room and the house to help satisfy my need to be organized! As my husband would say, “The Container Store, you know, for when that basket needs a basket!”
But, I still feel like I want to do some more reading on labor and delivery and bringing baby home. I know that no matter how much I read, I can only be but so prepared. Being a type-A person is tough in situations like this. It’s nice to feel like things are getting done so that I can focus my attention on other priorities.
Andrew continues to work on the yard and outside of the house so that it looks nice when everyone comes to visit the baby later this summer and fall. It’s an ongoing project to keep the grass looking nice and weeds out of the flower bed. It’s not his favorite (an understatement) but I don’t feel like mowing the lawn in the summer heat a month out from my due date.
Since we are now towards the middle of the year, it is time to review our budget so far. Normally, I would wait until early July so I can have June numbers as well, but 5 months and most of June will work just fine. Don’t want to put it off too long and have baby make an early entrance.
Our Budget Goals
When we started the budget process at the beginning of the year, our goals were:
- See what kind of lifestyle we are living in our house now that the initial projects were done
- Learn what we really spend money on and where we may adjust once baby arrives
- Find out how much (if any) is left over each month for savings
Our lives are very much still in a transition phase since we only have about a year from the time we bought our house to the time baby is due. That doesn’t leave a lot of time to settle in and adjust to a new lifestyle and budget. At the beginning of the year, we created out budget spreadsheet and listed in the first column what we though we spent in each category. This was to see if we knew ourselves as well as we thought we did. We also wanted to see how any big items that came up affected the overall budget as Douglas says to do in this article from NerdWallet and this one from CNBC.
What We Learned
Overall, I think we did pretty well in our estimations. There were two months though that hit harder than others. In those months money out the door was more than came in. Those were when we had to put the new roof on the house and pay taxes. The new roof falls into the emergency fund category which came out of savings. And taxes, well, we made some money when we sold some investments to help buy the house last year so, yay that we made money, but it was time to pay the piper.
Even though there are strong underlying factors for these two negative months, that means that we lost money in one out of every three months (OK, giving ourselves the credit for June being positive…watch a tree fall on the house or something after I publish this). That means even the tightest budget boats take on water at unexpected times, so having a few tubes of glue and a strong base (aka cash reserve) are essential.
We have also had a number of other larger expenses this year. Our puppy, Jeter, got neutered and microchipped so that cost a decent amount along with a deposit for daycare for the baby. And “our” shopping habit (also called Marie’s nesting instinct) has kicked up in recent months. Sorry, but I’m not a minimalist and want to have everything I need for a baby. And yes, I know babies don’t really need most of these things and would be fine without most of it, but that’s not the world most of us live in.
Changes to Spending Habits
So as our shopping number has increased, the “Leisure” category which is going out to eat or having drinks with friends has dropped drastically. It is a lot lower than we estimated. As Douglas always points out to soon-to-be parents, your expenses probably won’t increase but they will change. Your life priorities will change with a baby so what you do will change.
And for us, we have neighbors around our ages who are also expecting a baby about a month after we are, so the four of us go out to dinner occasionally, but mostly just alternate who invites the other over for dinner at home. It’s easy when you live across the street and neither pregnant woman really wants to have to put on non-stretchy clothes to go out to dinner somewhere nice.
On our budget spreadsheet that my husband thankfully maintains for us, he also created a line for net savings. This is to see how much our savings should have grown based on our budget. We looked at that and compared that number to what our savings had actually grown by and they are pretty close. Yay! We have been saving money despite our large expenses.
What’s Next?
Now that we are almost at baby time, we are going to have to see what effect it will have on our budget. I will be on maternity leave, so that will cut down on commuting costs for me for a few months. But will baby costs be more of our budget then anticipated? And how will adding in the cost of daycare look once that starts in the fall?
I will also be home with the baby all day and it will be hot this summer, so our electricity bill will probably go up. Our water bill will increase too with visitors, more laundry for baby and dishes in the dishwasher. Time will tell how much those bills will increase by.
Our goal would be by the end of the year to see what is left over in terms of potential savings and what to do with it. One option is that at some point, we will need a second car. We currently share one car and most of the time it is fine, but every now and then we need to be in two different places at once and it causes some issues. We are thinking that with the baby there will be more times where one of us needs to be somewhere with him and the other has to go a different direction.
There’s no ancient proverb that says “It’s a great idea to wake a sleeping baby and put him in the car to drive dad to the train.” I made Andrew bring his old bike back from his parent’s house, so, you know, he can save the environment by biking to the train station and/or save us both the headache of a crying baby. Ideally, we could see what we have available in the budget to get a second car. As Andrew would say, “your Mom tanks aren’t cheap.” He prefers to “feel the road,” whatever that means…
We will continue to track our expenses through the rest of the year to see how things have changed at the end. It is a lot of work but will help to keep us on track.