Having a baby, or how to lose $5,000 quicker than if you went to Vegas

In 1998, I finished my undergraduate degree in English Lit. and was offered two choices. Choice 1: take a job as an insurance salesman and be a bane to my friends (I had to take an test asking if I would feel comfortable trying to sell insurance to guests at a dinner party. I knew the right answer, but said "no" anyway). Choice 2: take a job teaching English in Japan. With $42,000 in student loans, I went to Japan.

Surprisingly enough, I actually paid off $8,000 in loans in just 2.5 years. Then I met the love of my life, flew home, and had the cheapest church wedding on record (we actually made money on the wedding -- I plan to put our method in a post very soon). We went to Washington, D.C., where my husband had been stationed as a Marine, and after a couple of frantic months I landed a salaried position working for a think-tank in downtown D.C. I had excellent benefits, we lived in a tiny apartment, had one paid-for car that got 42 mpg, and paid most of our bills (such as yearly car insurance) in bulk. We paid off another $2500 loan in just 4 months. Then I found out I was pregnant.

I knew, somehow, that babies cost money, so for the next 8 months I put approximately $750 a month in savings. We saved over $5,000 during that time. I didn't get paid maternity leave, so only planned to take 6 weeks, but $5,000 was more than enough to cover that. Plus, my husband was still working, and we planned to stagger our leave, with one of us home with the baby for the first 3 months.

Late in my pregnancy, we decided to move. First off, our rent was going up over a $100, making our tiny apartment $1000/month. Next, having a baby in a 480 square foot apartment seemed a little claustrophobic. Finally, we wanted a place with a washer and dryer (luckily we had this foresight, as I couldn't handle stairs for nearly two weeks after the surgery and our laundromat at the old apartment was in the basement). We found an excellent place within walking distance of the metro station; the market was dropping, so the usual monthly rent of $1475 had been reduced to $1200. Even better, an intern at my work needed a place to stay short-term, so we got a two-bedroom apartment and she paid a third of the rent for it. We patted ourselves on the back; we now had a place over twice as large, and were paying the exact same price.

My first child, a boy, was born in February, 2002. I had a difficult labor and ended up with an emergency c-section, which was fully covered by my excellent insurance. I had to expand my leave to 8 weeks in order to recover from the surgery, but still, we were well covered.
We thought.

Then it happened. I decided to check out childcare -- you know, it wasn't for a few months, but I thought I should get an idea of what was out there. You parents out there, you know what is coming, don't you?

Basic childcare in Washington D.C. for an infant under 6 months ran, at that time, from $1200 a month up. Oh, you're thinking, you must mean some kind of fancy, "let's teach our children math before they speak" kind of childcare.

No, that's not the kind I mean. I mean basic childcare, as in the kind where the workers look a little shifty but you cross your fingers and hope for the best. That was the cheap, $1200 a month kind, at least at the places near my work. It went up from there.

I'm sure I could have found childcare cheaper in the suburbs, perhaps further out from where we lived, for maybe $800-900 a month, but frankly, we wouldn't have saved much money that way. We would have had to purchase a car -- I rode the subway every day, which was fully financed by my work -- and between gas and insurance it would have cost us that extra $300/month -- and it would have added an extra hour to our commute each way. We were already putting in 10-12 hour days, and honestly, we didn't think we could take the stress of a trip into the suburbs after the workday was finished.

While these were interesting ideas in general, the cold, hard reality was not the cost -- it was the fact that we couldn't get childcare at all. Most places had a year waiting list; some had even longer. Childcare for infants under a year was at a premium; there simply weren't enough places equipped for babies, they could charge what they liked, and still people stood in line. I've heard since of people getting on lists as soon as they heard they were pregnant, losing the baby, and trying to get pregnant again quickly so they wouldn't lose their place in line. The insanity surrounding infant childcare is extreme in a way you simply cannot believe until you are in it.

We looked at our options, and our choices were bleak. One of us would need to stay home until childcare could be found, or we needed to move somewhere either childcare or cost of living (or both) was cheaper. I went back to my job, my husband took his 6 weeks off and we quickly found our money disappearing at alarming rates.

I received another $1000 in gift cards and cash after my son was born. My work alone gave us a whopping $600 check. But the expenses piled up; a car seat and stroller ($150), a breast pump ($275), and the simplest bed we could find, a moses basket ($60) added up to a whopping $485. That was before bottles and food and blankets and clothes and diapers...

Granted, we could have bought those things second-hand, but we were in Washington, D.C., a metro area that wasn't exactly family-friendly. I'd lived in areas where breast-pumps were constantly in the classifieds, but I never seemed to tap in to that crowd in D.C., so we ended up paying retail. Friends helped; I got a really great playgym ($50) from a shower that I used for both my kids, and our church at the time organized to bring us dinner every night for 10 days. Still, expenses kept piling up. We didn't buy a diaper pail and avoided a co-sleeper even though I was nursing, because co-sleepers started at $150 and diaper pails seemed to come with more gadgets than an airplane cockpit and couldn't be found for under $29.99. Our living room smelled of dirty diapers; our roommate, fed up with crying babies and smelly garbages, moved out. Our finances began to plunge.

We spent over $1500 the first 3 months of my son's life on stuff. To non-parents, that may sound completely unreasonable, but we honestly went into it frugally. It is just that there are so many laws, and so many scary penalties for not following those laws, that parents simply must comply. If you slip and drop your baby in the tub, you can be sued for child abuse and undergo an investigation -- thus $9.99 for a baby tub. Used car seats can have hairline fractures that compromise their safety, so we bought one new with a stroller -- $150 was a steal. The "safest" babyseat starts at $349.99 and only works until the child reaches 40 pounds. Our seat was an infant seat, and because my son was a big baby (almost 10 pounds at birth) he exceeded it within 3 months and we had to buy another seat for $150. Think we weren't looking ahead? We tried to use a "convertible" seat that is supposed to grow with the baby, but it was so large and bulky it wouldn't fit in our compact car, so we had to use an infant seat. In the end, we couldn't fit a seat in the car backwards that would fit my extra-large son, so after just 3 months we had to give in and actually buy a new car.

The new car, a Ford Focus, was as cheap a new car as we could get and we paid $11000. So now, on top of all the expenses of having a baby, we had a car payment (my one regret at this time is that we didn't buy a used car, but we were so overwhelmed we didn't think we could take it if we bought a used car and it was a lemon; ironically, we bought a new car and it was a lemon).

I went back to work and my husband decided not to renew his contract with the military, which was up in May. He'd saved up enough vacation he was able to leave the end of March. At first we thought we could make it on my salary, with him staying home, but with the roommate gone, the cost of the new apartment, the new car and the regular costs of a baby (diapers, wipes, food), our $5,000 was gone in the blink of an eye.

We had spent all we had and were sinking into credit card debt when my husband got a call back for a job in Tucson, Arizona. With a sigh of relief, I quit my job, we sold our ancient, tiny car to a relative and piled into the new one to drive four days across the country with a 4-month-old.

Five years later I am still battling the costs of having children, from my son's $50/month allergy meds to $300/semester "enrichment" classes to $40/month for judo. At every crossroad there is a cost; enrichment courses or cartoon afternoons? Childhood obesity or money for sports? My second child was much less expensive than the first -- we re-used those damned car seats -- but the costs are still there. Here in Tucson childcare runs around $500/month for infants. That's less than half the cost in D.C., but considering the University of Arizona tuition is $4800 and a year of childcare is $6000, it's hardly a deal.

So we wait, and pinch our pennies, and try to enjoy our children while they are little and try not to worry about money and try to avoid doing anything to compromise our children's futures... and the result is, I'm Tired in Tucson.

If you want to lose money fast, don't gamble. Just get pregnant.

(Photos from www.flickr.com creativecommons/babies)