Are You Financially Ready To Start Your Own Family?

3 min read By eCompareMo on April 25, 2015

Starting a family is easy, but making sure that your family can survive wave after wave of financial difficulties is something that will require more than love.

While most of us are inclined to start a family at some point in the future, a good majority of people looking forward to having a family in the future probably have no idea how to financially support them.

With that topic in hand, how will you know if you are financially ready to start a family now? Here are the telltale signs and some tips on how you will get there.

Calculate your budget

Before you even see your child born, you must’ve probably calculated already the amount you need to start your family, probably even extending to your child’s college year. To be honest, having a financial trajectory is fine, since it will allow you to have a clear picture of what will be the expenses for your kid for a very long time.

Start with a timetable, along with the phases of how your kid will be. Under those main items, you may want to list down the possible expenses during that phase. For instance, you may need to list down how much infant formula, diapers, and other expenses you may have in that phase. When you have a budget, you can control how much money you can allocate and weed out unnecessary expenses.

Be ready to cut down your expenses

They say that the moment you see your firstborn child, you will instantly be ready to give up everything for the sake of your child. When this happens, you must already be more than willing to make cuts to your expenses since the moment your child is born, your priorities have already been changed.

To make sure there’s enough budget for your baby’s necessities, you may need to give up a lot of things like fancy dine outs every weekend, your everyday coffee fix from your favorite coffee chain, weekend nights out with friends, and other things that are not necessary. Remember, your focus now is providing a good life for your family.

If you can borrow equipment from friends, just do it

Suppose that you have friends who are already full-time parents, and they’ve already been through the things that you’re about to experience. You may seek their advice regarding a lot of things, and more often than not, they are just as excited as you in your new journey. However, if there is one thing you must ask from your friends who are already parents, it should be to lend you their old baby equipment.

How does this work? Basically, there is a huge probability that your friends may have kept their baby equipment like strollers, cribs, feeding bottles, and others for sentimental purposes. And instead of buying new ones yourselves, why not just borrow them so you can save a lot of money? This also includes outgrown clothes, toys, and other inorganic equipment and tools. As for personal ones swaddling clothes, pacifiers, and feeding bottle mouthpieces, you may want to buy your own.

Consider getting health insurance

One of the most delicate stages of a person is during his formative years, and that includes from infancy to teenage years. This means that they are more prone to sickness and hospitalization, treatment, and medicine. From a financial standpoint, this means that you have to shell out a huge amount of money for your kid’s health. How can you alleviate this?

By getting health insurance for you and your family, you can reduce the cost of you and your family’s medical expenses. This will allow you to focus on more important expenses such as food and utilities. Furthermore, having health insurance pays off since this is a critical time of a person’s development–and you will not need to worry about medical bills anymore.

Starting a family is not easy. After all, you have to go through several financial hoops before you can say that you are a happy family. If you know how to take care of your finances wisely, then you never have to worry about finances less and more about your new family.