Hey guys, my wife and I are very excited that we are expecting. We are reading parenting and baby books. We want to make sure that we aren't overlooking anything if we can avoid it. My question to the wondeful people on this sub is what can we do to prepare financially for the birth of our child. A little background info first. I am 29 years old making about $56k a year and she makes about $30k. We have a mortgage that comes out to $860/ month including taxes, HOA (townhome) and Insurance. We have about $21k in savings; this is a little over 6 months worth of living expenses for us. We both have retirement accounts I have a 401k, roth IRA and she just has a Roth IRA. She and I are only contributing about $100 each per month to the Roth accounts. I contribute 6% to my 401k and my company puts in 10% of my salary in there. All 3 accounts bave a little over 30k all together. We arent fully debt free, I have a student loan with a $9,000 balance and we each have car loans. She has positive equity on hers, we owe about $9,000 on a ,$16,000 car and i owe $15,000 on a $12,000 car.
To keep things simple our monthly expenses are about ,$3,300 a month. That includes all of our bills and money that we allow ourselves to spend. I am currently putting money inside of an HSA at work mh company matches $1,200 a year in there. I should have about $6,000 saved in there by our due date. (Early March 2018) that should cover our out of pocket expenses for a natural or c-section delivery (used our health cost estinator from our health insurance website, using our actual doctors and facility prices). At the moment we can save about $1,000 a month, which we are in preperation for the baby. My wife and I both have life insurance policies that are provided from my work, I have long term disability insurance as well as a high deductible health insurance policy with a $3,500 deductible. Thanks for the help! I think we are fairly well prepared but this is our first jump into parenting and want to prepare for what we can.
Edit 1: forgot to mention, My wife will not be paid while on maternity leave, however I get 6 weeks off paid to bond with the newborn. I am thinking of picking up a part time job during this time so I can make up for some of the lost income. Both sets of grandparents live in our city so we should be getting some help with childcare. My mother is retired and her father is retired. We dont know the details yet of how many days a week they could help but we will know more of that as time goes on.
Submitted July 03, 2017 at 08:23AM by Elwalther21 http://ift.tt/2uhaU8T
