Don’t Break Your Budget Buying Baby Stuff

Awhile back we received an e-mail from a reader asking about the “real” cost of raising kids. In short, she’s heard a lot about the high cost of raising kids, and was wondering if it’s really as bad as people make it out to be. More than anything, this question seemed to have been born out of angst over what it takes to be financially “ready” to start a family.

While we’ve never really kept tabs on exactly how much having kids has added to our expenses, we learned a number of tricks for keeping the costs down. After all, when we first started having kids, we were on a shoestring budget. I was a graduate student, and my lovely and talented wife dropped from full-time to half-time employment.

Perhaps the biggest thing we did to stretch our dollars was to avoid dropping big chunks of change on baby stuff. Rather, we combed the flea market and local garage sales for barely worn bargains. And no, we weren’t scraping the bottom of the barrel — this was nice stuff. Nicer, in fact, than we would’ve been able to buy if we had bought everything new. And since babies rarely wear things out, our flea-market finds later became hand-me-downs.

In many cases, we threw down pocket change in return for nearly-new, high quality, name brand outfits that survived all four of our boys. And in some cases, the stuff was still in such good condition after going through all four boys that we ended up re-selling it in a garage sale of our own. We even found a barely used crib in the classified ads that served us well through all four kids, and which we were ultimately able to sell for nearly as much as we paid for it.