This summer, I gave birth to my third child. Amongst all of the other new baby admin and anxieties – the blur of hospital appointments, tests and the incessant need to check that she was still breathing – something else was simmering below the surface. I was waiting for a big invoice to be paid, checking my inbox for work enquiries and worrying almost incessantly about money and my family’s financial security.
When my daughter was six days old, my husband returned home from the school run to find me, wild-eyed and panicky, trying to film some content for a brand campaign I’d taken on just before my due date.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Having already lived through a maternity leave that was marred by financial stress in 2018, back when I was struggling under a mountain of personal debt and earning a comparatively low wage, I had sworn that this time would be different.
When we started planning the hypothetical child that would complete our family, I was confident in our ability to save enough to cover at least a few months of leave. I am also fortunate enough to enjoy a career that’s flexible enough to accommodate caring for a baby in between projects. As a freelance writer, coach and content creator, I work mostly from home in short, regular snatches, a far cry from the 9-5, office-based role that I worked in when my son was born. I wasn’t naive enough to think it wouldn’t be difficult sometimes, that we wouldn’t feel the pinch a little, but there were curveballs that I didn’t see coming and challenges that I underestimated.
If one of the big advantages of being self-employed is flexibility, then surely its biggest disadvantage is insecurity. At the time when we decided that another child was a real possibility for us, and what we wanted, my income had been stable, growing, in fact, for over three years. All of the sums – and I did many – pointed to us surviving fairly comfortably, despite the additional financial weight that inevitably arrives with each new person you are responsible for. Then, around the time my daughter was conceived, some seismic political and economic shifts caused everything to change.
My income remained good for the remainder of 2022, after which it dropped off a cliff. The surging cost of food put paid to a big campaign with a supermarket chain, and as the word “recession” reverberated around the country, lots of my income streams started to dry up as budgets were slashed and projects were put on indefinite hold.
Some of the money that I’d saved for my maternity leave was needed to bridge the gap, meaning that the pot was getting smaller, rather than larger, as my due date loomed. By the time my daughter was born, it had dwindled to almost nothing, and I was reliant on a sprint finish of projects to allow me the financial space of any kind of leave to recover. Even that time was rife with professional ghosting and offers being pulled because of nerves about the late stage of my pregnancy.
I wish I could give you a clear-cut list of mistakes that I made, or things that I wish I’d done differently, but the truth is that having a baby makes that all quite difficult. I could say that I wish we’d waited a little longer – to save more, or to see how things were headed in the economy – but the timing of my pregnancy resulted in this specific child, smiling at me from her bouncer as I write this. How could I wish her different or, worse, away? This makes me think about Richard Curtis’ 2013 film, About Time. Here, the central character must stop travelling back to make changes after his daughter is born, lest he inadvertently change everything about her. And so it is with me and money.
One mistake I did make, though, was my complacency about the impact that my pregnancy would have on my ability to earn, and my assumption that I’d be able to carry on working roughly as normal once my daughter was out of the newborn stage. I misremembered the enormity of a new baby, and I failed to give myself enough breathing space to accommodate it. I also assumed that my status as a new mum wouldn’t be off-putting to potential clients. Judging by the tumbleweed in my inbox over the summer, it almost certainly was.
In practical terms, given my time again, I would cut more expenses from both my personal and business budgets, and sooner. An annoying quirk of lifestyle creep is that it is only really visible when it becomes unaffordable – but I wish I’d looked a little harder for it, a little earlier. I would plan for the worst-case scenario, rather than hoping for the best and I would definitely, absolutely, create a fund specifically to get over that first hump of childcare costs – something that I’m still hoping to achieve by burning the midnight oil for the rest of 2023.
A flurry of new, fairly lucrative work and the approach of my busiest business period has brought relief in recent weeks, giving me hope of being able to steady the course of our finances before we run into real trouble again.
I will need to work hard, to juggle my baby and my career in a far more fraught and complex way than I’d hoped, but it feels like I have narrowly skirted a complete disaster. If I were to choose one word to sum up the experience, it would be “humbling”. It has shattered any illusions of infallibility I had and reminded me how close we all are to financial difficulty.
Whether employed or self-employed, a drop in income is often a symptom of having a child – one that coincides necessarily but often catastrophically with an increase in outgoings. The newborn essentials, formula or extra food for the breastfeeding munchies, the endless stream of expensive products that are marketed to new parents to help them get a moment’s peace or a smidge more sleep. The colossal cost of childcare, often to be paid up front, with deposits and admin fees abound. It’s an expensive time, arriving just as your means are depleted.
Clare Seal is the author of Real Life Money and Five Steps to Financial Wellbeing
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