Financial Planning — DIAPERS!

When they found out we were going to have a bably, all of my friends warned me that a big expense would be in diapers. From what I’ve read, it takes about 5,000 diapers for each child. We figured that by planning well we should be able to keep the cost at around $.25 per diaper, or $1250 from birth to potty. That doesn’t sound too bad, but we’re also going to explore options…

We thought it would be fun to set a goal of raising the kid without buying a single diaper ourselves. We knew it would take some planning (and begging), but it would be fun to see how well we could do. After four weeks, we bought our first pack of diapers yesterday. We’ve already fallen short of our goal of not buying any, but we did pretty well. Luckily, we have some decent storage space, so by getting as many diapers on the front end, while everyone was excited, we tried to cover as much as we could before she was born
Here are the strategies we’ve tried so far and our plans for te future:

1) Register for diapers instead of clothes and toys. Everyone wants to get you lots of stuffed animals and cute clothes when you have the baby. We made sure that we’re registered for multiple value packs of diapers, and also made it easy for people to get them for us by using Amazon’s baby registry. We made sure to register for several different sizes so we’ll have them available as baby grows.

2) Baby Shower Diaper Drive. Our families threw us a couple of smaller showers, and we had a pretty large “baby party” for our friends here in town. For the big party, we bought a nice night on the town (cocktails, nice dinner, movie passes for two) and gave it away as a door prize in addition to some smaller prizes for ice cream and only movie passes. Tickets for the drawing were obtained by bringing diapers (any size, any amount). Bring more diapers, get more tickets.

3.) Amazon Diaper Subscription. Every year my parents ask what I would like for Christmas, and every year I respond, “nothing”. This year we’re going to ask for a diaper subscription. The bonus here is that the buyer gets a 15% discount for buying the diapers through the subscription. The diapers are delivered to your door, and you can choose the frequency with which they are delivered. If we are lucky enough to have 2-3 different people enroll for the subscription, each would only have to pay for the diapers every 3 months or so.

We did’t really expect to save any huge amounts of money by doing this. By asking for diapers as gifts, we were basically foregoing a lot of the normal stuff that people give as gifts, and figured we’d end up having to buy them on our own. To our surprise, most people got oter gifts as well, at least at the showers.

Newborns go through diapers pretty quickly, and we’ve already saved a nice amount of money by asking for diapers. Give it a shot!!!

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