SMC Common Concerns: How can I afford to have a baby on my own?

Ok, first for a little reality check.  I am 40, highly educated, with a solid resume and marketable skills.  Not every Single Mother by Choice is in this position, but judging from the posts on the Single Mothers by Choice discussion boards the majority are at least highly educated.  Even those of us who have chosen a career path that is traditionally underpaid (social work, teachers, etc.) have the education and skills to earn more if we need to for our children.  So why the worry?

For me it wasn’t so much that I couldn’t imagine how I would afford a child, it was more that I couldn’t imagine how I could continue to afford my pre-pregnancy lifestyle.  Travel, restaurants, entertainment, gadgets… altogether I was spending a lot of my income and saving only about 15% of my six-figure salary annually.  And I’d only been earning that much for a few years, so I was really just getting started with emergency and retirement savings.  The good news was that I didn’t have any debt except my mortgage and student loans.

And then, in the middle of the worst economy in recent memory, I decided halfway through last year that it was time to leave my job and strike out on my own.  By the time I actually left my job last December and got my last paycheck, I was pregnant with twins, out $40,000 for infertility treatments, and unable to get much done on my new business because I was sick as a dog from morning sickness.  I started to panic– how was I going to afford everything?!?

But things have a way of working themselves out when there’s no other choice.  I slashed my spending dramatically, going back to doing all of my cooking and eating at home, getting rid of my gym membership and iPhone (in favor of a pre-paid emergencies-only cell phone), and putting the call out to friends for gently used baby items.  I put my house on the market (it hasn’t sold yet), postponed buying a new car, and simply stopped visiting Amazon.com completely.  I got a huge tax refund since most of my infertility expenses were tax-deductible and used it to pay my living expenses for 6 months.  By June, I had booked enough freelance work to make ends meet every month and had inherited enough baby stuff to keep my own spending for Audrey under $300.  Wow!  As her arrival nears (I was due yesterday!), I am happily working from home part-time with a balanced monthly budget and a fledgling business that should start bringing in the money for long-term goals soon.  And the panicked feeling is completely gone.

So here are the top 5 lessons I learned about affording a baby as a Single Mother by Choice:

1. You can’t live your pre-baby life, but then nobody can. Lots of single female friends have asked me how in the world I plan to continue my previous lifestyle with a child.  The answer is: I don’t.  But I don’t know any couples who manage to do this, either.  It’s a matter of money, yes, but it’s also a matter of priorities.  The newest iPhone or a Disney vacation with Audrey?  Um, no contest.
2. You have at least a year to figure it out. When I was considering becoming a Single Mother by Choice I felt like I had to figure out the money situation before I could even start trying to conceive.  The reality is that conception can take a long time, but even if it happens on your first try (lucky you!) pregnancy is still 40 weeks.  And let’s face it, babies don’t really need much more than a basic wardrobe from friends or consignment, a safe place to sleep, diapers (the new cloth ones are amazing!), a breast and love.  It doesn’t have to cost a fortune, and chances are good that any woman over 35 is going to inherit a ton of stuff from friends who have just decided they’re finished with making babies.
3. Not everybody enjoys my level of flexibility, but changes are always possible. I was lucky in that my last job teaching journalism at a university gave me an opportunity to teach online.  That combined with the popularity of my subject (web skills) made it possible for me to work from home on my own business.  So I won’t have daycare expenses, worries about maternity leave, or any of the other problems working mothers usually face.  Not everyone is in this position, but changes are always possible.  You could spend the year before the baby’s birth working out a telecommuting agreement with your current employer, or spending some time upgrading your skills so that you can change employers altogether.  You could move out of an expensive city to the suburbs (see lesson #1… it’s all about priorities!) or even to a small town with a lower cost of living.  And you could decide to work from home, accepting that a cut in pay might be a small price for spending more time with your child.  Change and sacrifice don’t feel as dramatic or difficult when they’re in service of children… I promise.
4. That’s what life insurance is for! As a Single Mother by Choice and cancer survivor with parents in their seventies and no brothers or sisters, I am probably in the worst possible scenario when it comes to providing for my child if I should die.  Who would take care of her?  How could I ensure she gets a good education?  Of course, these worries are common in every family, and the financial system has come up with a way to address them: life insurance.  After decades of living alone, with no dependents and only cats to worry about, I’d pretty much forgotten life insurance even existed.  But it does, and it’s affordable, and it’s the solution to most of my problem.  Now I just have to pick her godparents…
5. Go green and save the planet and your wallet. I went to Berkeley for grad school and got bitten by the green bug pretty hard while there, so I was really interested in reducing Audrey’s impact from the start.  I decided to start by drawing up a baby budget and then attacking it item by item to look for ways to green our lives.  My first baby budget included all of the typical items: crib, diapers, clothes, travel system, etc.  It came in around $3,000 for standard items (Gerber onesies, an Evenflo car seat, Target crib, Sam’s Club diapers).  Wait, $3,000?!?!?!  And that was all BEFORE she was born.  Then I found some interesting websites about raising green kids and the fun began.  Turns out going green can also be great for your wallet– as long as you don’t get caught up in ordering the high-end organic items from specialty websites!  The first thing I found was a series of blog posts called “Baby Essentials That Aren’t” (link is to the first part on cribs) and that gave me some great ideas for things I would simply NOT buy at all.  Like instead of a travel system with infant car seat, I got a convertible car seat (as a gift from my parents, clearance color to keep costs low) and will use a Moby wrap (got as a baby shower gift) to carry her until she’s big enough for a lightweight umbrella stroller.  Instead of disposable diapers for 3 years, we’ll use Fuzzi Bunz cloth diapers (got about half of my supply used from a friend and bought the other half) and resell them for almost half their purchase price when we’re done.  I also plan to introduce the potty early with the goal of getting out of diapers as soon as possible.  And of course I’ll be continuing to make all of my own food, so I’ll make hers as well once we’re finished with breastfeeding.  There are literally hundreds of good ideas online for greening baby’s life… and putting a lot more cash back into your wallet at the same time!

And if you have tips or ideas I didn’t think of, please post them to the comments of this post.