How To Reduce Your Monthly Expenses After Having Kids: 6 Effective Tips
Having children can be more costly than you can ever anticipate. While many people should look for ways to reduce their monthly expenses if possible, this is all the more important if youre just had kids because you will always need the money for something. Here are the six most effective, tried, and tested tips to help you reduce your monthly expenses after having kids. Good luck!
How to Save on Food
If you find yourself in a financial pinch after having children, you have probably realized that most of your money is spent on food. A simple way to prevent wasting money on unnecessary food is to plan out all the meals and we mean plan out all the meals, breakfast, lunch, dinner, and all the snacks in between for the whole family, weekly. In addition to this, you can even use cash restrictions to resist the temptation of shopping over your list. Simply bring a specific amount of cash with you and nothing else to keep you in check.
Plan Ahead for Holidays
Another way planning can significantly reduce your monthly expenses after having kids is to prepare for the holidays early. More often than not, holiday shopping is done last minute and many people fall under the shopping frenzy late in the year. Many experts note that setting a spending budget for gifts depending on your financial situation. In addition to this, its recommended to keep a separate savings account for these specific funds and budgets so you could add a little bit of money to each account to reach your savings goal without straining your budget too much.
Save on Electricity Bills
Another great way to reduce your monthly expenses after having kids is to watch your electricity bills. While this may translate to some restrictive measures that may decrease the commodity of your familys life, it doesnt always have to be so. An alternative to this might be to compare electricity plans so you could aim at getting the best deal for your household. You might not even realize youre entitled to a better electricity or gas plan, which can significantly reduce your monthly expenses, especially right after youve had kids. If youre unsure of how this works, there are many means to make comparing electricity and gas bills faster and easier.
Child Insurance
One of the lesser-known ways how you can reduce your monthly expenses after having kids is to add your child to your health insurance policy. This is typically the most affordable option when talking about insurance in general. Usually, you will have about a month from the day your child is born to add them to your health insurance policy to ensure everything is covered from the very moment the child is born. For your first children (one or two) this usually means that the amount of your take-home pay will be reduced by the increase in monthly premium.
Rethink Housing Options
When (more) children come, the need for more space will most definitely arise. Ideally, you should take time early on before even having children to plan for the additional costs of having a child and figure out just how much you can afford to spend on your new housing situation. Another thing you should consider is that you might want to move to an area that has a good school district once your children are school-age, or even before that so you could better accommodate them in a new neighborhood. This often equates to living in a more expensive area.
Benefits and Support
There is a wide array of financial support and benefits available to help you with the costs of looking after a child. If youre expecting a baby you can get free NHS prescriptions while youre pregnant and even for a year after your baby is born. In addition to this, you could also be entitled to child benefits which are delivered in the form of monthly payments for each child you have. The amount of money awarded is usually the highest for an older child and it can add up for as many children you might have. This can be extremely beneficial to help you with your monthly expenses in an indirect way.
Having kids, as weve mentioned early on, can carry many unexpected and unforeseen expenses making it all the more important to reduce your monthly expenses. While you may be busy with diapers and small children running around to get to it, these six tips can come in to help you out. They are also quite easy to implement and require little to no effort without serious strains to your monthly budget.