Baby Expense Report: Month 1

By an overwhelming margin, many of your responses to the question–“What do you want to read more of on Fiscal Fizzle?” from last week’s post had to do with our new baby. I’m glad to hear that!

As a result, my first order of business will be reporting our monthly baby expenses on or about the 8th of every month (his birthday!). I hope this will serve as the basis for debate, questions, and exploration of what it means to be a “frugal parent.”

In a few months, these posts and many others having to do with “baby money” issues will be placed on one of many special “sneeze pages” that I’m creating for the site. For now, you can click back to our pre-birth expenses by checking out my spending commentary by trimester: First Trimester, Second Trimester, Third Trimester.

Without much more introduction, here is a brief summary of this month’s baby expenses:

[iframe http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tougPtbVKk-_d-xQIg1Cz2Q&single=true&gid=0&output=html&widget=true 500 300]

If you’re unable to see the embedded Google Docs spreadsheet, click through to the original post.

Overall, I am very happy with the way this month turned out. We prepared so many things ahead of time that we didn’t feel rushed or pressured to buy anything. That resulted in a non-savings outlay of only $127.

Here are a few points of note about this month’s report:

• Most of the items on the list are “little things” that we noticed a need for as we got to the actual execution of our pre-birth planning efforts. Most were either things that we noticed we needed more of, or things that we thought would not be useful, but turned out to be.
• The biggest item on the list (after diapers) was a changing pad we bought in order to make changing time easier at home (we opted not to have a permanent changing table). That’s actually working out very well, and well worth the money.
• The hospital bills have not arrived in the mail yet, but we have seen the final insurance claims get processed through. With supplemental insurance, we’ll actually end up making money--but I’ll definitely share more details on that with you later.
• Payments for medical insurance have not kicked in yet, and we are also going through changes in our insurance status. Also more detail on that upcoming soon…

I hope to make these reports as useful as possible for you! What else would you like to see or know from these reports? Are there areas you’d like to me to address individually?

For example, a couple of people mentioned college savings as a topic they’d like to hear more about, which is definitely something I’ll tackle in the next few months. Another area I will definitely focus on is health care.

By the way, both baby and mama are doing great–thanks for your continued outpouring of support and encouragement. It’s great knowing that such an awesome community exists in my fellow bloggers and readers of this blog!

Until next month…

Photo by M.ADA