New baby on the way how much extra a week do you spend

jen1301

PeacefulWaters wrote: »

Has nobody got a sense of humour?

I do have a sense of humour actually. It's just very clear from this thread and others, that TBeckett100 is just an unhelpful member that just likes to criticise the lives of other members.

Make-it-3

I think OP was thinking about budgeting for ongoing costs rather than the one off buys.

OP you cut your cloth according to your budget. But as a rule they get more expensive as they get older.

I breast fed, cloth nappied and used mostly washable wipes so I barely noticed any additional spend. Then baby led weaning so never bought any of those baby specific foods.

DD is nearly 4 and I still don't think the day to day costs have a great impact on our budgets.

dizziblonde

We used to go through about a pack of nappies a week (about £4 for the supermarket newborny sized ones), a pack or so of wipes a week (feels like more as you end up with packets in your car/handbag/everywhere) and baby formula (for the best laid plans can go to pot sometimes) varied depending on the size of the feeds they were taking - by the time they were hitting the 6 month or so mark, just before weaning when their milk feeds were at their most, it was just over one carton a week (about a tenner for a carton). When you hit weaning age it's whatever you make of it really in terms of costs - even if you don't go down the baby led weaning route (we didn't) - I still made the bulk of their meals and adapted/mashed down/replaced the pasta in our sauce with baby size ones for them and froze pots all over the place to keep costs down. I still freeze small pots of leftovers now for emergency toddler meals for them.

You tend to have bigger periods of expenditure periodically - in terms of the new baby stuff... then picking up a high chair getting toward the 6 month mark... then changing car seat stages at various points. These are generally fairly obvious when they're looming though.

Clothes and toys - I still pick up a lot for mine (they're now toddlers) second-hand in charity shops. I get lots of designery stuff for absolute pennies and ridiculously good toys dirt cheap that way. I got lucky in that I have two very close together in age and the same sex so clothes handing down is a bit easier for us though! As they tend to wear stuff for longer periods of time when they move into toddler years though stuff does actually get worn out a bit more and there's less nice second hand stuff around (got a pair of Levi jeans for my 2 year old though for £1.50 the other week though). We also do things like waiting for Clubcard boost to come back around on kids' clothing and stock up then for the next size up, and buy a lot in the sales and put it away - until very recently I had boxes under their beds for clothes sizes up to about age 6/7 and I'd chuck bits in as I bought in advance. I even advance buy things like school uniform tights and trousers when I see them on special - although I don't know what school mine will be going to - all the schools around here have grey bottoms for their uniform so that one's a fairly safe bet!

AngelOfTheNorth

In terms of things like cloth nappies, you'll want to work out how relatively expensive your washing and drying is. If you're on a pay as you go meter and don't have a lot of drying room, cloth won't necessarily be cheaper, especially in winter. If neither of those things is true, it may well be, especially if you have something like a wash-house or other covered drying space not in the house. Those are worth their weight in gold when you have kids!

I would also say that quite a lot of costs can be recouped afterwards. There's a thriving second hand market for things like prams, especially the premium sort like Bugaboos, and the more expensive children's toys. So for example we bought a jumparoo, usual purchase price £90, on sale for £80 and used a £10 voucher we already had towards the cost- making it £70. Once it's finished with, the resale value should be about £40-£50. We were lucky to already have the voucher, of course, but even without this the total cost would be about £30 if you sell it on. And people swap prams a lot, too.

AngelOfTheNorth

And a surprising number of people have decent kids stuff just lying around, taking up space til they get round to chucking it once their kids are too old for it. You may well find people are glad to get rid of stuff, if you just ask for it.