The Cost of a Baby - Budget Update (April 2014)

So at the beginning of my pregnancy, I created a Budget Goal for Minion's first year of life. It pretty much broke down to us spending $2000 for everything that Minion would need. Now that I have reached the end of my pregnancy and we have gotten everything ready for his arrival, I wanted to evaluate how we have done so far.

Thanks to the generosity of our friends and family and some super savvy deal hunting and couponing on my part, I can say we have been able to get Minion everything he'll need and we'd possibly want for the foreseeable future.

I'm sure there will be things we need over the next year, such as larger sized clothes (we're completely set for the first 6 months). But I tried to anticipate diapering and toiletry necessities we'd need and stocked up with coupons and sales.

So how much has all this cost us?
Out of pocket we've spent just over $1000. Plus we still have some gift cards left over for picking up anything we might not have anticipated needing.

The above spreadsheet shows how that broke down. As you can see, we are under budget in most areas and we did get to splurge on quite a bit of unplanned items.
The main areas where we went over budget were Maternity and Nursing Clothes and Misc. items. I honestly never even thought of toiletry items we would need like baby wash and lotion until the last few weeks. Fortunately these items are often on sale and can be couponed for so now I think we have more than we'll need in the next year.
And of course those subscription boxes are by no means "needs" but since we've been so under-budget everywhere else, I felt Minion and I deserved the splurge ;)
Walking into the next year with over $800 still available for spending on Minion is pretty exciting and I look forward to keeping track of how we do in the end.