How To Afford A Baby (The Nine-Month Plan To Finance Having A Child)

ABC Books (published 2007)

Written By Justine Davies

Country Australia

Review 4 Stars – Excellent Book

How the blurb describes the book:

Question: What can be more expensive than a house yet weighs only about 3.5 kilos?
Answer: A Baby.

For many couples wanting to start a family, being able to afford a baby is a modern dilemma. There are so many costs – before and after the baby’s arrival – medical expenses, maternity and baby clothes, prams, bassinets, cots, and all those nappies ... the list is endless and it all adds up (very quickly). How can you possibly pay for it all?

Featuring realistic financial planning advice, How to Afford a Baby offers you some sanity – saving hope so that you can start your family without the worry.

In this book, mother and financial planning wizard Justine Davies explains how to manage your money throughout pregnancy and beyond, with achievable and practical advice on how to:

-          plan for time off work

-          work out how long you can afford to take off

-          juggle financial commitment on a partial or no income

-          get the best bargains on baby clothing and equipment

-          work your way successfully through the complex maze of government rebates and subsidies

-          and even how to plan your superannuation and insurance to cover the needs of the new addition to your family

Packed with great tips, practical information and an achievable week-by-week plan of action, starting from the moment you discover you are pregnant, How to Afford a Baby will have you in great financial shape so that you can truly enjoy your bundle of joy.

Mr Home Budget’s Review:

The question on the back of the book sums it up nicely for me: What can be more expensive than a house yet weights only about 3.5 kilos? Answer: A Baby! Trust me, a baby is expensive, real expensive. And any help you can get to afford this bundle of joy (or extra mouth, depending on how you look at it) can only be a real good thing.

While this is a great budgeting book getting you ready for a new baby, it is also, surprisingly, a great budgeting book even if your baby is years away. The book reads as if you were pregnant, and goes from prior to conception to after the birth. Justine breaks this down by chapters into weeks. For example, the book is structured as Week 6, 7, 8 and so on right up to Week 40, the week of the birth.

At the start of each chapter/week, Justine gives her life experiences as to what to expect in this week regarding your body. This can include morning sickness, tiredness, forgetfulness, weight gain or just plain crankiness. All those nice things that a woman, unfortunately, has to put up with for nine months. However, don’t expect this book to replace a full on baby/birth book. It is just a rundown on things you might come across. Happily, she throws in humour to help lighten the mood.

However, Justine also breaks down what you need to do financially to get your budget ready for the baby. These topics include but are not limited to:

-          How to Check for Government Benefits

-          What You Should Purchase Prior to the Birth

-          Family Tax Benefit B

-          Making a Will

-          Getting Insurance

-          Checking for the Best Home Loan Deal

This is really where the book excels. By breaking down the big goal of getting your post-baby budget on track, Justine chunks down each task to a small weekly exercise, thus allowing you to help your money situation without having to devote a 40-hour week to it. Plus the book can be read week by week for each new task, rather than in one sitting.

How many times have you read a book you really enjoyed, only to find six months later you can’t really remember all the finer details of the book, because too much time has passed? As this book is meant to be read weekly over nine months, you will be given a memory boost each week. This is truly a book that acts like a GPS system, getting you back on task to your big goals.

Some of the paragraphs that I really took a liking to include: “I am always intrigued by clients (Justine is a wealth advisor) who blithely inform me that they have a great budget and a great savings capacity. In fact, they tell me, their income is substantially more than their expenses. Applying a small grain of salt, I peruse their financial statements and note any absence of any regular savings or additional payments off the mortgage. So where is this extra income that they do not spend? Usually they smile at my naivety and advise me patiently that ,no, at this stage they don’t have any savings, but the point is that they could if they wanted to. Seeing a shaft of understanding fail to cross my face they continue to explain that their budget shows a healthy surplus, but of course they spend this surplus on other things. I ask if they mean other expenses. No, no they assure me. Not other expenses, just other things. Like clothing, entertainment, holidays and anything else that doesn’t arrive in the mail in a window-faced envelope. Hmmm.”

Plus this tip from Week 6: “This is the real big one. The behemoth chapter. Everything that follows in this book depends upon you getting this bit right. And it is without any shadow of a doubt the hardest task you will have to do. For most people it is a horrible experience, which is probably why the vast majority of people do not have, or have never in their lives had, a written budget. I don’t know what the official statistics on this are (if there are any) but I can confidently state that in my years of seeing hundreds of clients, only 20 per cent would have a written budget. This leaves 80 per cent of the population budgetless. Can you believe it?”

To sum up, by taking these steps weekly throughout your pregnancy, you will have one less pain to deal with whilst in the labour ward – the pain of worrying about how you will afford this little John or Martha when they join this world.

Pros:
- Very Funny.
- It will make couples want to have a baby, if only to get their budget sorted out. (Depending on how you look at having a baby, this could be a pro or a con.)
- The way the book is written, you start to get more excited towards the end of it as the birth gets closer. It’s almost like you are expecting a real baby to fly out of the last chapter.

Cons:
- While men will get a lot out of this book, some parts will probably go over your head. For example, what is Munchausen Syndrome?
- Suggests an interest-free loan to purchase some of baby’s bigger needed items. Come on, Justine, you should know better than this.

We did a interview with Justine Davies click here to read.