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NYT Parenting readers shared their experiences and advice.
By Dani Blum
Alice Stryker knew she was anxious about becoming a parent. But she couldn’t identify why until she and her husband started attending couples therapy sessions soon after she became pregnant.
“The biggest worry wasn’t the sleepless nights, it wasn’t spit up, it wasn’t how to clean things,” she said. “It was, how the heck are we going to get the money for all this?”
To alleviate the stress, Stryker, 33, of New York City, and her husband, Max, started a Google doc to track their spending and savings goals. It has helped them weigh the pros and cons of the financial decisions around parenting, from choosing among diaper brands to deciding whether to go out to dinner. The doc even helped them figure out that they could afford a private birthing room for their daughter’s delivery in November.
The hardest part has been trying to project Stryker’s income. She cobbled together 14 weeks of paid parental leave between disability benefits, personal time off from her job at a museum and New York state family leave, and her paychecks don’t roll in on a set schedule.
Still, Stryker credits the doc — and the therapy — for preventing the fights about finances she has heard that some of her friends experience. “We’re not talking past each other,” she said. “We’re talking to each other.”
As part of our series “The Price of Modern Parenting,” we asked readers to share their experiences and advice on managing money while co-parenting. They responded with stories about spreadsheets and sleeplessness, impulse purchases and money-centered date nights.
When Christine Anastasia, 37, set out to buy a home with her husband outside Boston about seven years ago, she thought that their financial picture looked good. Now that they have children, though — a 3-year-old and a 10-month-old — “There is no padding, zero,” she said. She and her husband both work full time in education, and Anastasia has a grueling 90-minute commute twice a day, which she said has affected her marriage, her finances and her children.
She and her husband, Mike, meet with a financial counselor each year to look at their budget and overall expenses, but there isn’t a lot of wiggle room.
“We’re not going on vacations; we’re not spending out the ordinary,” she said. “I do a pretty silly magical moving of money just to get by.”
A lot of the couple’s conversations are like business discussions: how much can they spend in a certain period or how to divide a certain cost. She and her husband get paid on different schedules, which adds stress; she allocates almost all of her paycheck to day care.
This past year, since she got back from maternity leave, has been the most challenging year of her life, she said. She gets so anxious about her finances that she can’t sleep. Anastasia has tried to prioritize her self-care — going to yoga, getting acupuncture. “There have been so many times where it’s like, I can’t hack this,” she said. “I can’t develop my own company, it’s not like there’s a side hustle I can be doing — I’m already burned out.”
Jason Ormand recently gave up his freelance work in television production to take care of the children full time — a move that he said has changed his entire approach to money.
He thinks more actively about his purchases now, he said, and sometimes feels guilty for spending when he’s not contributing a paycheck.
“You think you can keep doing things the way you’ve always done them,” said Ormand, 35, of Dallas. “And you don’t ever stop and pause and think about all the basic little details that may or may not destroy your marriage or your life.”
Ormand and his wife made a New Year’s resolution for 2020 to talk more openly and frequently about money. They try to go on regular date nights — “the least romantic dates of all time,” Ormand joked — where they can discuss the concrete details of budgeting for themselves and their two kids.
Sharing emotions around money with his wife, and figuring out ways to address them, has been an unexpected but welcome relief, he said. “Everything is always stressful when you’re trying to feed two kids, and you have all these payments that are just going to come out. So what do you do? You need to fill your head with something that’s going to work. Otherwise you’re drowning and miserable.”
Anna Legard wanted to have a baby years ago. But she and her husband waited, largely because they didn’t feel financially ready. When her husband re-upped a contract as an associate dean at a college, and she felt that her own career was stable enough, they decided to become parents. Their daughter was born at the end of September.
Legard, 33, of Ithaca, N.Y., had moved in with her husband before they got married, and the couple had combined incomes early on. Near the start of their relationship, she told him that she had a fair amount of credit card debt; he lent her the money to clear the debt, and she paid him back in full.
Legard has maintained an Excel spreadsheet for their household income from the start, monitoring every transaction and checking the receipts against the posted amounts. She and her husband also use an app called Goodbudget to check that they haven’t gone over their monthly budget. It especially comes in handy at the grocery store, she said, when they’re weighing whether to buy a pricier cheese or a cut of meat.
Disclosing every purchase to her husband has at times been difficult, but it’s essential for the relationship, she said. As a way to feel productive when she was on maternity leave, she sometimes bought items for the baby: a clothes rack, a humidifier for her daughter’s room. Cutting down her personal spending has been a challenge, but the thought of child care costs and the knowledge that her husband would find out about her purchases have sometimes stopped her mid-shop. The other day, she almost bought a pair of shoes; then she stared at the shopping site and reconsidered. “That’s like four hours of work,” she said. “I’d rather spend that money on day care.”
Dani Blum is a news assistant at The New York Times.