My wife and I are expecting our first child soon, and I'm trying to plan out our expenses at least a little bit so that things aren't too much of a surprise. We've got major purchases down like stroller, crib, car seat, etc. (we raided the liquidating Kids R Us and scored some great finds), and now I'm trying to price out diapering.
One thing that's confounding my research is that the available analyses out there on the internet seem to vary wildly in their cost estimates. This breakdown from Babygearlab estimates that 3-year disposable diapers cost over $2000, which seems wildly high (though their estimate includes all accessory costs such as wipes and diaper pail and more). The wirecutter puts the estimate more at $600-700 for 3 years of disposable diapers (diapers alone).
A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation that I did for Target-brand diapers (supposedly well-reviewed) put the estimate at between $700-800 total for disposable diapers when not on sale - I imagine buying in bulk when on sale could reap substantial savings.
Setting up a cloth diaper system appears to be on the same order of magnitude: approximately $600-700 when buying new (buying used could also get significant savings but... used diapers?).
My questions:
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Does anyone have any experience pricing this question out? Could you share your experience and how it went?
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Does anyone have links to good analyses looking at the cost/benefits?
My intuition is that cloth will win out on price alone; however, I'm trying to get a better understanding of the marginal cost difference between disposable vs. cloth to see if the time cost of cloth is worthwhile.
Other considerations: my wife and I are not entirely unsympathetic to the argument that disposables are pretty wasteful and bad for the environment; we'd be willing to pay a small premium if it had some mitigating impact on waste. Also, this is our first child, and we'd like to have another one or possibly two - I've heard that cloth becomes an absolute killer in terms of savings when used on multiple children.
(x-post /r/personalfinance)
June 07, 2018 at 08:16AM
