If you or your significant other is pregnant with your first child, you’re about to discover that raising a child is not only hard work, it’s also expensive work. Between outfitting an entirely new person, taking care of medical costs, and purchasing everything he or she will need for the foreseeable future, you can plan to spend a pretty penny on your new addition. But luckily, you don’t have to break the bank in order to have a perfectly happy and healthy pregnancy and subsequent child. To show you how, here are three tips for spending less when preparing for a new baby.
Skip Purchasing A New Maternity Wardrobe
As Baby’s body grows and changes, so does Mom’s. And depending on the size of Mom and the size of Baby, those changes will either be relatively small or very large. But because you can’t know how much the body will change until it’s changing, Hilary Osborne, a contributor to The Guardian, recommends not purchasing too many maternity items until you actually need them. Maternity clothing can be very costly, so if you’re hoping to minimize expenses, you should try to limit spending here. In today’s fashion world, billowy clothing is very in, so you may be able to get away with simply wearing larger sizes of normal clothes when you need a bit more room.
Take Advantage Of Hand-Me-Downs
Because babies grow so quickly in the first few years of life, you’ll find that your little one will need a whole new wardrobe every few months. This can get very expensive when you need to replace every item they wear multiple times a year. But one great thing about babies is a lot of people have them, meaning a lot of people have clothes their kids no longer fit in because they’re growing as well. So to save a lot of money now, Noelia de la Cruz, a contributor to Parents.com, suggests borrowing, exchanging, or using hand-me-downs for your child’s clothes when you can. Even though you baby will only wear each item a few times, the chances of their clothes getting ruined are pretty high, so there’s really no point spending a lot money on something that will only get stained beyond decency in a very short period of time.
Stick To The Essentials
There are a lot of businesses making a lot of money selling unnecessary baby items to inexperienced parents. Knowing this, Kimberly Palmer, a contributor to U.S. News and World Report, recommends only buying the essentials for the first year or so to help save money and live a simpler life. Some of these essentials should include a car seat, stroller, crib, diapers and minimal clothing. Once you’ve had your baby for a while, you’ll get a better idea of what things you could use to make your new life easier and what things are just superfluous.
If you have a baby on the way, use the tips mentioned above to help you spend less money on all baby items.
