Advice on Financial Goals before TTC

[victoriablackwell]

Hello all- I’m feeling particularly down about waiting today since my husband and I looked at our budget last night and there’s SO much to save it feels like we will never be financially ready for a baby.

For some context: We’re both 30, working decent jobs (but I work at a nonprofit soooo, not making bank). On one hand, our lives feel stable (careers, pets, married).... on the other hand, our savings aren’t great (hubs was a FT grad student for 2 years recently), we have some credit card debt, and are still living in an apartment. (Trying to also save for a house down payment, ugh).

I’m looking for advice on 2 questions:

1- What savings goal did you set specifically for pregnancy/L&D/maternity leave/daycare before you TTC?

2- How do you cope with feeling like the timeline keeps getting pushed out? Or the wait is longer than you want?

A big part of me just wants to say fuck it—I’m not getting any younger and it’s not like we’re broke... but my planner/responsible side knows that it will all be easier if we are ready for all the costs baby will bring. Please help!!

 

[mandapanda]

@victoriablackwell One thing I have heard which I thought was great advice is to research daycare rates for your area and start depositing that much each month into a savings account. If you are planning to stay at home, put your entire salary in. That would serve 2 purposes: make sure you can work your budget around daycare, and to save a bunch of money for baby-related expenses. Seeing as you have other savings goals, you might not want to take this approach until your credit card is paid off. (Also you could probably start this AS you TTC, since it'll be almost a year until baby!) My other advice is that babies can be had in apartments if it's too long to save for a down payment.

As for the second question I am waiting more for career reasons (27 and in my 5th year of my PhD) and will still be WTT probably 2 more years. I have filled my schedule up with non-stop fun and travel. While that may not help if you are trying to save money, I found that coping by starting registries, watching baby videos online, etc. usually make it worse rather than better for me.

 

[gallinal]

@mandapanda Such smart advice about saving the daycare fund. It’ll create quite the nest egg and make the actual payment feel less jarring later on!

 

[victoriablackwell]

@mandapanda Thanks for commenting! Yes, thankfully I have a friend with two little ones, and she has given me current daycare rates. We are saving over that amount per month total, but it’s going into various buckets (emergency fund, travel fund, house fund, car fund, kid fund). If we put it all toward baby we would have to stall saving on everything else. And yes.... not to mention.... paying off credit cards!! I’m starting to think that we either need to choose baby or house and just focus, or we will be spread too thin.

Thanks for sharing what coping mechanisms to NOT do.... I’ve so far just been educating myself on fertility, TTC, pregnancy etc but I feel like it keeps it too top of mind for me and maybe I need to ignore all of it until I can get closer to my savings goals/TTC.

 

[mandapanda]

@victoriablackwell I know a lot of people on here like to immerse themselves in baby, so YMMV. I think since I have such a long wait it is counterproductive for me!

I don't want to get preachy but it might be wise to shunt some of your savings into paying off CC debt, since the interest rates there are so much higher than what you would get back from investing your savings. Best of luck!

 

[victoriablackwell]

@mandapanda Not preachy at all! I agree that having the debt is bad. We paid off a significant chunk this winter but thought about switching focus to savings.... but perhaps that was the wrong tack. I appreciate the input and help!

 

[kevintristan]

@victoriablackwell My husband I bought our house in August because I was adamant that we become home owners before TTC.. but now he is facing being let go due to school budget cuts and it is terrifying. Our cost of living essentially doubled by buying a house and we would be able to save so much more for a baby if we had waited to buy a house until after TTC. I can't go back in time and I LOVE our house.. but maybe you can put homeownership on the back burner for a while? You have your whole life to buy a house!

 

[roars]

@victoriablackwell We’re planning to stay in our apartment because we live in downtown Chicago and won’t find anything this big for this price. I don’t think you need to have a house before baby, but I also don’t know what your apartment looks like. Do you have room for baby stuff? We’re not going to have room for a massive crib and rocking chair and piles of toys and etc., but we know where a bassinet and dresser and stroller will go.

We also wanted to have a 6 month emergency fund in place, and no debt. We were really lucky to have graduated with no loans, so that was a lot easier for us than it sounds. How aggressively are you guys saving right now? Can someone pick up a side hustle like reselling clothes or something?