A Recap of Baby-Related Expenses During The First Six Months

Not breaking news: Raising a baby is expensive. How expensive? Well, I keep a very meticulous personal budget each month. So I went back to look over how we spent our money on baby-related expenses for the first six months of my daughter’s life. While your situation certainly won’t be identical to mine, I wanted to at least shed some light on the actual costs of raising a child. I will regularly do this at six month intervals.

My financial strategy, at least at this stage in our lives, is to allocate $200 per month to what I like to refer as ‘baby stuff’ in our personal budget tracker. Fancy and high-class stuff, no doubt. If we spend exactly $200 a month, great. But that has never happened in 15 months. So I’ve always moved on to my next step.

I have a baby-only savings account through my bank. It generally holds several thousand dollars that are only used for, you guessed it, baby stuff. How we decided to fund that account in the past and how we’ll do so in the future will be highlighted in a different article. The caveat is that money only gets pulled from that account if we’ve already spent the allocated $200 per month. If on a given month we spend less than $200, then the difference between that and our purchases is deposited into that account.

Now that you know how I’ve set things up, let’s dive into the monthly numbers.

I highlighted in this article what we purchased and how much we spent for various items pre-baby. So none of what is highlighted here focuses on anything purchased before March 9, 2023–the date of my daughter’s birth.

I figured there was going to be a lot of money spent on things we had already purchased, but didn’t have enough of. I was pleasantly surprised to see that only two items–changing pad fabric liners and sleep sacks–needed reserves. Those two purchases set us back about $55.

While my wife would eventually start producing a lot of milk, we still needed a few days of supplemental formula beyond what she received in the hospital. That was $12 from Walmart. Once the milk starting coming in, my wife rapidly outpaced our daughter’s hunger. We purchased breast milk storage bags for about $35 and stored the rest in a freezer.

A copy of our daughter’s birth certificate set us back $21.50. A set of baby headphones cost nearly the same, but I don’t think she ever used them.

Just under $100 was spent on an assortment of items, including a cloth book set, Easter basket, bunny rattle and teether, baptism dress and an outfit for her first Easter.

Even though we spent less than $200 in April, I didn’t transfer the remainder to our bank account. I’ll chalk it up to the lack of sleep.

My wife was making way too much milk, so we needed to invest in more milk bags ($10). Not a bad problem to have.

My car has built-in sun shades, but my wife’s doesn’t. That purchase was $15 and the baby was screened from the sun.

Later on in April we were out of the smaller sized diapers given to us at the baby shower. I purchased a first-time diaper kit from Sam’s Club for $50 that included 130-ish diapers and a decent amount of wipes. The problem was that we went through the wipes too quickly, so we purchased a bulk set for $23, also from Sam’s.

Those were the only purchases. However, I only deposited $62 into the baby account. My memory is foggy.

May was the first month to show why we have a baby-only bank account because we went well over budget. Parenting, as they say, is anything but predictable after all.

This month was the first time we took baby girl on a trip. My wife’s family has a lake house about 3.5 hours away, so naturally we wanted her to experience water that didn’t come out of a faucet for the first time. $196 was spent on a swimsuit, swim diapers, water float, popsicle holder (for teething), sunglasses and a pop-up tent. That tent was $85 and I haven’t seen it since. I’ll need to check with the wife to see if she knows where that is.

$45 was spent on burp clothes and one of the orders included a free set of pajamas. Another $71 was earmarked for new clothes at Carter’s.

She was baptized on Mother’s Day 2023 and we threw a little party for her back at our house. The food cost was $210. We also got a decorative booty that shows her birthday, height, weight and date of baptism. That charge to the credit card was $32.

And on a much less exciting note, we used $12 to purchase our first set of Diaper Genie refills.

June was the easiest month that we had financially that year and I don’t think it will ever be topped.

We spent $22.93 on baby wipes. The transfer to the baby-only bank account was $177.07.

After one month of relief, we were right back on the overspending train. To be fair, July included Amazon Prime Days, so we took advantage of buying things we didn’t need this moment, but would later. For example, we spent $200 on baby gates, but saved $90 off of the regular price.

She got some fun items this month, including an $85 Einstein jumper, $25 music ball, $15 boxed bible set and $52 worth of books, rattles and blocks.

She was teething AND had acid reflux. So baby Tylenol and oatmeal cereal to put in her milk set us back $12. New bottle nipples to allow her to suck the oatmeal cost another $12.

This growing girl needed two new sleep sacks, so we paid $21. In case you don’t know by now, you can never have enough burp cloths, so Amazon took $35 of our money for the Burt’s Bees version. Finally, $11 was spent on some frozen thing for teething and $30 on glass storage jars that my wife would use to store our daughter’s purees in the months to come.

We went over budget in August, but the cost to raise a baby is the cost to raise a baby.

The month started off with the purchase of a new baby monitor. We gave our old one to my mom so that she could be monitored while sleeping at her house. The cost was only $46.

It was time for new diapers and that total was $45. The Diaper Genie also needed to be refilled, and that was the same $12 as before. Sticking with the digestive theme, baby girl still had some reflux so we purchased more oatmeal for $6. This was a big month, as it was the first that we bought two bottles with handles. She picked them up faster than we could’ve dreamed. This experiment only cost $17.

A couple more sleep sacks for $25 and a fairly aggressive $132 for new clothes rounded out the last true month of summer.

Autumn is a lovely time of year and it presented us the opportunity to not go over budget for once. And we seized it!

The first $73 was used to purchase more diapers and wipes. Seriously, you can never have too many of the latter.

I enjoyed $20 on her first official Philadelphia Eagles (Fly Eagles Fly!) onesies, and we followed up that clothing purchase by spending $46 at Carter’s.

The last purchase of the month was $50 spent on new pacifiers, toy straps and pacifier clips. The toy straps connect to her toys and bottle because our little girl was in a throwing kind of mood. For a near-germaphobe like me, there are few things worse than the idea of toys or pacifiers being thrown on the ground. I love those clips and straps!

That left us $11 under budget, and that money was quickly put into the bank account.

The ideal number we would’ve spent for the first six months of baby-expenses was $1,200. Spending more than $750 over budget doesn’t necessarily sound great, but as with everything, context is needed.

First, if we were in a pinch for money we could’ve greatly cut down on the food for her baptism party. But, it was a great day to spend with friends and family and was worth the $210 expense.

Second, we didn’t need to purchase the gates in July. We could’ve waited several more months. But we saved nearly 33% of the price and were ready to go.

Finally, $250 of the above number was put back in the baby-only bank account, so while it counts for this exercise, we didn’t actually ‘spend’ that money.

If you factor all those things together then we were only over budget by about $100 over a six month span. Considering we’re first-time parents and didn’t know what the fu*k we were getting into, I call that a win.

What should be taken into account is we do not pay for any childcare and my wife’s insurance is top of the line. Adding our daughter to the plan didn’t add $1 to the premium, else I would’ve added that to the monthly figures. If you use childcare or have sh*t insurance, then you can plan for an additional $1,000-$1,500 (or more) per month.

The advice here is simple–set up a budget and stick to it. There will be surprise expenses that come up and/or you’ll want to splurge on things occasionally. Give yourself some wiggle room, mark down the sh*t you’re spending money on, and review it at the end of every month. Just setting a budget puts you ahead of 80% of new parents.

Let me know how your first six months went in the comments!