How much did you save when deciding to have new baby?

[Anonymous]

Enough to cover my unpaid 12 weeks off.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Zippo! Zilch! Nada!

To be fair, we were working very hard to pay off grad school and not have debt, and to save up for a house. I don't think we spent much "extra" on our kids, but we are crazy frugal. I think it all depends on your lifestyle pre-kids.

Huh. Our childcare costs were more than our mortgage. Did one of you SAH after the baby was born?

[Anonymous]

We didn't specifically save money for having a baby, but we did make sure our finances were in order. Our biggest expense is childcare and we made sure that we could still afford child care while paying bills and saving for retirement.

This is a slightly weird question to me. You really won't be able to save enough to afford having a baby before having a baby. But you should make sure that you can afford to pay child-related expenses as they pop up without going into debt.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We didn't specifically save money for having a baby, but we did make sure our finances were in order. Our biggest expense is childcare and we made sure that we could still afford child care while paying bills and saving for retirement.

This is a slightly weird question to me. You really won't be able to save enough to afford having a baby before having a baby. But you should make sure that you can afford to pay child-related expenses as they pop up without going into debt.

+1 - we're working on this now. I don't think my husband fully understands how expensive it's going to be so I'm drawing up a budget to at least know where we stand.

[Anonymous]

We made a point to save more in preparation of me SAH to care for the child. Unfortunately we're having problems and looks like that money might need to be used for IVF instead. I'm glad we have money set aside instead of having to think about financing that.

[Anonymous]

$100,000