What Should You Do Financially Before Starting a Family?

Hoo, hoo, hoo, that's a little spooky, is it not? So today's episode, I'm gonna be diving into what you need to do to be financially prepared before walking in and having a family and starting to have babies.

Now, given y'all, okay, don't wait until the stars are aligned to start having your family, right? Okay, that's kind of unrealistic.

You know, go through the flows of life, and when the time happens, I mean, it happens.

But what can I do to prepare myself before this next time and this next chapter within my life? So I'm gonna kinda walk you through some steps of what you can start thinking about to get yourself ready financially for when the new baby arrives.

Now, I was kinda going out there and doing some research of, how much does it cost, nowadays, like, in today's dollars, how much is it costing to raise a kid, average, just here in America? And when I was looking it up, I saw on average, from raising a kid from when they're zero years old, from the time of birth until they're 18, it's costing $300,000, approximately, over those 18 years to raise that kid.

Now, given, if you break that down into yearly, you know, it's about 17, $18,000 a year is what it's costing.

So, you know, and, and this m- is, is just an average number, right? There, there's club sports the kid may be into.

Maybe they do have some health problems.

There's medical expenses.

Um, there's so much [laughs] that goes into just raising a kid, right? And even some stuff that we don't even think about.

Like, I was even thinking, as a woman, right, how much does it cost in hospital expenses to have a kid at a hospital? And when I was doing that research, if you don't have the insurance, it's, you're gonna get a bill for about $20,000, and if you do have insurance, it's gonna cost right around, like, 2,000, 2,500 bucks with that insurance.

Now, that's on average, y'all.

Don't quote me on all of this, okay? [laughs] I'm not the expert there in, in what's it cost to have a kid at a hospital right now.

But, but it, it is costing some monies, and we need to make sure that that is kind of on the forefront of our mind, because oh my gosh, you don't wanna go into debt just to start a family and, you know, live your life.

So I wanna walk y'all through some money moves and questions that you can start asking yourself before walking into this next chapter.

So let's get into it.

Step number one, understand your current cash flow before adding the baby.

And not so much as asking how much is it gonna cost me to have this baby, but you should understand where is your money going right now, and how much is it costing you to live right now.

Now, y'all, totally excluding just this specific niche of families, everybody, everybody, whether you're a business owner, a W2 person, you have a family, you don't have a family, you're single, you're a bachelor, you're wilding out, I don't care what you're doing with your life, but you need to understand your current cash flow.

I can't tell you how many people come to me wanting my support and helping them get out of this money pickle that they're in, and when I ask them, "Well, hey, what's your current cash flow like? Where are you sending your dollars right now?" They have no idea what's going on.

Y'all, I can only help you if we know what's going on.

Because if you know what's going on, you'll know what to do, and then I can give you my feedback.