Baby Costs – Month 1

I was trolling around CNN the other day and noticed their Cost To Raise A Child Calculator.  Interesting… According to the calculator, it will cost the Big Guy and I approximately $236,190 to raise this baby over the course of 18 years!  In the first year alone, CNN predicts that we will spend about $12, 500….

Ummmm, really?

I beg to differ, so for her first year at least, I am going to track what she cost us!  She turned a month old a few days ago, so here is what we spent in her first month of life.  I use Mint.com to track all of our expenses, and because I wasn’t really sure what we were going to need to buy for this baby, I created a special category to put expenses under that I just called “Baby.”  Anything and everything baby-related that we bought went there so I could see exactly what we spend – this is why I love Mint.com, and why this post will be sooooo easy to write!

Clothes: 12.46

We were given an unbelievable amount of clothes, and her grandma has been buying her clothes like crazy.  We also got lots and lots of giftcards, so the few thing we needed we bought with those.  I did, however, splurge and buy her a cute little going home outfit and took her newborn pictures (myself) in that outfit.

Pump: $245.24

I’m a working woman, people.  This was just necessary

Pump Accessories: $83.21

Spare parts so I don’t go crazy with the insane amount of cleaning you have to do when pumping, bags, and extras in case I lose something :-)

Rug for the nursery: $31.22

The floor was ugly…enough said.

Camera: $364.25

Ok, ok, we didn’t really need the camera, but we really, really wanted it.  Our old camera was getting really outdated and hard to use, so we bought a new one.  However, buying the camera did save us some money, because I took her newborn pictures myself, and I will continue to take a series of pictures every month for her first year.  I think I probably saved us more than we spend on the camera :-)

Grand Total: $736.38

A couple of notes – We haven’t seen a hospital bill yet, but as I said before, that should be no more than $2,000.  Also, I have been couponing for diapers, wipes, and baby food since I was 3 months along, so I didn’t include the extra money I spent there.  Mostly I just added $50 a month to our shopping budget, and put that towards good deals on baby stuff :-)

What do you think?  Did we overdo it?

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