From Single to Married With a Baby
December 15, 2015My friends often laugh at how quickly my life changed within about 18 months. I was happily single with plans to be a working woman with no husband and no kids. A friend of mine told me that I needed a life and suggested I check out a dating website. I said “never” but was intrigued…
I normally try something once and then dump it. This time, I said that I will give the dating website three months and I paid for a three-month subscription. About 5 minutes after I subscribed, a man named Scott winked at me.
We were married about a year later and a month after that, I found out that I was pregnant. I went from happily single to happily married with a baby in a pretty short period of time. As a result, I had to re-assess my finances and make changes for the wonderful new additions in my life.
We reviewed each of our health insurance policies to see if it made sense to keep our policies at our employers or for one of us to move to our new spouse’s policy. Sometimes there is a surcharge for employees adding a spouse whose employer offers health insurance, but my husband’s did not. Thankfully, I factored in maternity care (thinking as I looked: we probably will adopt so why am I bothering to look?) and realized that my policy would pay more so I stuck with my policy. We also changed the beneficiaries on our life insurance policies, increasing the amounts based on a calculation we did on the LifeHappens.org website since we had more people depending on our income.
I contacted my renters insurance company to let them know of my new roommate. We increased how much insurance I had on the property and added a fine jewelry clause to cover the cost of our wedding rings. We also consolidated our automobile insurance policies, got a discount, and added each other as a driver to our policies.
We changed our beneficiaries to each other on our retirement plans and IRA accounts. My will was old and outdated and my husband did not have a will. We learned that the will is typically the only document we can use to establish guardianship of our kids if something happened to both of us so doing a will became important. We used my company’s pre-paid legal plan to create our estate documents.
We decided that we wanted to hold everything jointly so we re-titled our cars and checking, savings, and brokerage accounts to have them held jointly. This was a personal decision. Every couple has to decide what makes the most sense for their situation.
I knew that I wanted to take the maximum maternity leave offered by my employer, but that meant figuring out our expenses. We created three budgets: a pre-baby budget to figure out how much we can save for baby items, a maternity budget to factor in the drop in income while on maternity leave, and a post-maternity leave budget to account for daycare expenses. Having a gauge of the cost really helped us to prepare for our bundle of joy.
If I could go back, I would had spent less money on the nursery. After all they can’t really see for the first few months and typically spend most of their time in the parents’ room and then they only sleep in their room for at least the first few years. By the time they care about the décor, they have a very strong opinion of what they like and don’t like. My daughter had no appreciation for the work that went into her room. She just wanted to chew on everything.
I also would have bought fewer clothes. Most parents will get a ton of clothes as baby gifts. They also outgrow them so quickly.
These are only a few of the things to consider when going through life changes. Of course, not everyone has the advantage of being a financial planner or married to one. If your employer offers free financial coaching, I encourage all of you to take full advantage of it to you to help you walk through all the things to consider as you transition through life stages.