Gabe and I have had an “operating” budget for the last couple of years that we have lived together and over the last three months we have budgeted for some of Baby’s key essentials. Now that all of the key items have been bought(except the baby monitor) we are looking at downsizing everything when I go on maternity leave and become a stay-at-home mom for awhile.
I have always envisioned being a stay at home mom and being there for all of baby’s events so this is a dream come true. I can’t imagine having baby call someone else “mom” at first or dropping my child off at daycare. Thankfully this is what I wanted, but I wouldn’t be able to work at my job and afford the daycare options with a teacher’s salary anyways.
After looking at multiple options of child care(just in case) I figured out that even with the Chandler School District teacher discount we would be losing money each day that I worked and our boy was in daycare. This clearly doesn’t make sense to me… but I’ve known from my mom that some of her co-workers are okay with working and literally coming up even/or paying a little more so that they can maintain a job instead of staying home full-time. I know this is a personal choice and there are a lot of opinions on this but it doesn’t compute to me on an emotional level, or even monetarily in the educational field.
So after crunching numbers we have an operating budget for each month. I have listed out what payments get paid when, and everything is automatically taken out each month.
Entertainment:
We have made a conscience decision to not have Cable, Netflix, or use Redbox to decrease our entertainment costs. We will be keeping Internet as the only necessity for checking balances, blogging : ) and keeping up with family around the country. Thankfully there are not any movies we want to see out in theaters so its much easier to with go from the theater experience for the next year or so… baby will keep us busy too.
Food:
We are only buying healthy essentials for our house. We are no longer buying candy or sugar-infused food… my sweet tooth might just have a heart-attack fyi. With that said we are also not going to purchase any more soda because it is obviously not healthy and definitely not an essential. We have learned to buy our meat, bread, milk and cheese in bulk and freeze the majority = Costco is a LIFESAVER. Oh and coffee… no more Starbucks for me!
Non-food Goods:
We stock up on paper goods and essentials when they are on-sale. Using some key manufacturer coupons has lessened the cost even further… I feel like such a good shopper when I save our family money! We are also going to try to use primarily ALL cloth diapers for baby. This will substantially lessen our monthly childcare costs! My mom used cloth diapers for all three of us and I plan on doing the same.
We are going to continue to go through our “stuff” to see if there is anything we can turn in to a second-hand store to lessen our storage load and earn a little cash on the side : ). Yeah for trying to get organized before baby gets here!
Gabe and I have also both applied to more jobs. I am trying to get a coaching job that would work with our schedules as a family-enabling Gabe to be with baby while I am coaching practice and games at night and on the weekends. Gabe is looking into some part-time work for a couple evenings a week. I would rather be the one working though at night and on the weekends so that Gabe isn’t burdened and so that he gets quality time with our boy. Plus Gabe and Dirk could come and cheer on the team!
All in all we are aware that we need to be thrifty and work together to make living with a downsized budget possible for our family. I love that we can discuss these hard issues as a team and that we are both on board!
Crossing fingers that I get a great coaching job! I <3 COACHING!
