Baby news can put anyone over the edge considering the upcoming medical bills, acquiring all the baby gear, nursery furnishings, clothing. All this is besides the upcoming every day expenses, like diapers, formula, health insurance, etc.

I am a minimalista and in less than three weeks we are expecting our second child, this time it’s a boy! We already have a 2-year old girl, and by going through her stuff the other day, I realized that we hardly need anything for our new baby boy! I would like to share with you how I managed to spend very little on both of my kids and still have all the necessities.

In this post I will be talking about setting up nursery. You can spend a ton or spend a little, it’s up to you. All I’m going to do is provide the information that could help you make the choices that are right for you!

1. Relieve yourself from extra work. If you’re planning on more than one kid, I would recommend designing the nursery in colors that would be appropriate for either gender. In my case, I knew ahead of time that we were planning on having two, so I chose to paint the nursery light green. I’m glad I did. Our two kids happen to be of opposite gender. To avoid extra work, we moved our “big” girl into her new room, leaving the nursery exactly the way it is. No more painting or moving the furniture (in the nursery that is). We still had to paint and decorate the room for our 2-year old though.

2. Furniture choices. If it’s your first, you’re probably thinking of the type and pieces of furniture you would like to purchase. First, ask yourself, what will you need and for how long? Some of the key pieces for the nursery include crib, dresser, changing table and a rocking chair. So now, lets look at it practically.

Do you have a piece of furniture already that you could possibly use for your new nursery, like a dresser, crib or a rocker? If yes, then you can build upon what you already have. This is what we did. We already had a dresser that my husband used since he was a boy. It’s old, but still in decent shape and adds character to the room. So I decided to purchase a crib that matched the dresser as closely as possible. You don’t have to necessarily get pieces that match, depending on your vision.

Now, evaluate the furniture that you may need piece by piece. What is the length of time it’s going to be used for? How practical is it to have for now and for later? Can you live with the same furniture for a while or do you need to update your furnishings every few years?

For example, if you were going to purchase a dresser, can you see it as a permanent piece that can be used for a long time? In my opinion, definitely. Your child can use it until they move out! Then it could probably be used in a guest bedroom. Is it worth spending the money on? I think it is.

What about the crib? There are tons of styles and types. There are light and portable ones, that can be wheeled from room to room on the regular basis. There are also more bulky ones that are not portable, but they can be converted from a crib to a toddler bed, to a day bed, and finally to a full size bed. What style is more appropriate for your lifestyle? If you choose to go with a small portable crib, consider that in couple of years your child won’t need it anymore. You will have to replace it with an actual bed. In this case, I would go with a less expensive brand or even a used one. For a used crib or other furniture check out garage sales, local newspaper ads, including their online ads, Craigslist.com,  The Flyer, etc.

If you choose to go with a convertible crib, then maybe spending a little more is worth your while. This is what we did. I decided not to go with the cheapest crib and got what I liked. Since it’s convertible, this bed should be good for one of our kids until they are fully grown and then some.

Lets talk about the changing table. You will probably use it for a year or less as an actual changing table. Then you can convert it into a storage shelf or get rid of it completely. In my opinion, it’s not a very practical piece to acquire, so I would not go out of my way for it. Here is a conversation between my friends that I experienced earlier this week. One (Olga) is expecting a baby in a few months. Another (Ira) has a one and a half-year old and planning on the second in a year or so.

Olga: “Do you think I should get a changing table?”

Ira: “I’ll let you borrow mine, make some extra room in my attic.”

Olga: “I can buy it from you if you like.”

Ira: “No, I’ll need it back, but I’ll be glad to lend it to you!”

Looks like it’s win-win for both parties. Olga will get her changing table and Ira will have extra room in her attic for the time being. Lesson learned: borrow from friends things that you’ll only use for a few months.

I actually chose not to get a changing table. I decided to get it as part of the playpen. If you check out the link, a removable changing pad attaches to one side of the playpen and can be used for a few months as well, just like the changing table. If you’re worried about storage, it also comes with a removable pocket on the side to place diapers and wipes into. It’s easy to remove once your child grows out of it. You get to save some bucks on the furniture and you don’t have to worry about what to do with it once your child grows out of it!

What about a rocking chair? Again, you will probably use it for only a few months, as far as your baby is concerned. Then you got to ask yourself, can I fit it into my home decor as a permanent furniture piece, once my baby grows up? If so, get the one you like and keep it for a while. If not, then it’s probably easier to borrow or buy a used one that you can easily get rid of later.

In my case, we already had a hand-me-down mini recliner that is a rocker as well. The fabric on it was a bit old-fashioned, so I updated it with the fabric of my choice.

So this is my input on the furnishings and for more decorating tips, visit my earlier post, How I Decorated My Nursery Cheaply. Stay tuned for my next post about choosing a stroller and a car seat.

If you are reading this post, you are probably desperate.  First off, congratulations on your pregnancy! I hope my story will help you save money on your maternity bills if you don’t have maternity coverage.

In April 2007 I found myself pregnant.  I called my insurance first to find out if they covered pregnancy.  The answer was ‘no’.  Then after calling numerous insurance companies I found that pregnancy is considered a pre-existing condition and none of them could cover me, since I was already pregnant.

I started to get worried.  We have a baby on the way and we will have to pay for the doctor, labs, hospital ourselves!  How much will it be?  Where are we going to get the money?  What if there are complications?

My husband is self-employed and I wasn’t working at the time. We had individual insurance plan through a major insurance carrier.  The only way they would cover pregnancy is if I had maternity coverage before I got pregnant or if we had group insurance through the business.

I didn’t even know that we could get a group insurance plan. In our state of Florida, a business is qualified for the group insurance as long as it has a minimum of two employees who need insurance.  My husband would have to add me to his payroll in order for us to be qualified for a group insurance plan. Would it be the cheapest way to go? Find out here.

One of the big mistakes we made is, we signed up for Maternity Card.  They promised that they will help us reduce our maternity bills by negotiating with the providers.  After paying them $700, we realized that it was a scam and they currently have a class action lawsuit against them filed by the state of Texas.  They did give us our money back eventually, but it took a lot of my nerves and back and forth negotiations.

Doctor’s Bills

In the meantime I started calling OBGYN doctors in the area to find out their pricing.  Apparently they have different rates for the insured and the uninsured customers.   If you don’t have maternity insurance, tell them upfront that you will do ‘cash-pay’.  They will quote you a price for their maternity package.  It usually includes all of the doctor’s visits and delivery.  Here you will learn more about all of the important financial questions to ask a doctor before signing up with them.

Lab Bills

The doctor will require you to do some lab work during your pregnancy.  Some tests are required and many are optional. Obviously, in order to avoid extra costs, just refuse the optional tests. Usually the doctor won’t tell you which tests are optional or required, so it’s up to you to find that out before they do the test.

Find out how you can do some required tests for free or at a very low cost here.

Hospital Bills

When I was about five months pregnant I went to the hospital for registration.  During registration, tell them that you don’t have maternity insurance and you will do ’self-pay’.  They will quote you a price that will include delivery and hospital stay.  Sometimes hospital will give you a discount as long as you prepay by the n-th month of your pregnancy.

Keep in mind that this package does not include any other services like the specialists, anesthesiologist or pediatrician.  If you are planning on getting pain reducing drugs during labor, you will require anesthesiologist.  It Anesthesiologist’s services are quite pricey, but it doesn’t mean that you have to be in pain while in labor so you can avoid paying anesthesiologist. Trust me, when you’re in labor pain, you won’t care! But you can significantly reduce your specialists’ bills by using techniques I describe here.

One more tip, make sure you are in true labor before you rush to the hospital.  If you show up thinking you are in labor and the hospital doesn’t admit you, you still have to pay.  We had it happened to us and it cost us $500. Learn here how you can avoid this expense.

And finally, do you want to know right now how much your pregnancy is going to cost you and the options available to you? Do you want to gain instant access to the information that’s going to resolve the financial uncertainties you have and give you a piece of mind right now? Learn about it here!

In any case, I wish you happy and healthy pregnancy, as well as quick and easy labor!!

For affiliate information for my product please visit http://lowerpregnancybills.com/affiliate/ . This link can also be found on the bottom of the sales page.

In September I actually followed through with the idea from one of my earlier blogposts about turning off my garage freezer in order to save some money on my energy bill. Around the same time I also started rinsing my dishes with cold water before putting them in the dishwasher and the same goes with washing my hands.  The rest of our energy consumption stayed relatively the same, since this September in Florida was just as hot, if not hotter as the rest of the summer months.

One of the motivators for making this adjustment was the increase in energy bill over the prior couple of months. Usually our electric bill is under tolerable amount of $200, but in July and August of this year, it hit as high as $230. That’s when I decided to go ahead and turn off the old freezer in our hot garage. I am assuming that the freezer was on constantly, since I heard its buzzing sound every time I would pass by it, whether it was day or night. The freezer is quite old, the insulation is worn out, the poor thing had to work nonstop in order to compensate for 100 degree + temperature in our garage. And we had to pay for it!

Another thing I did, as I mentioned earlier, is I started rinsing my dishes and pots with cold water rather than warm, before putting them into the dishwasher. Same goes with washing my hands. Luckily, the “cold” water in Florida is still about 80F warm, so it was a very easy adjustment for me.

Because water has high heat capacity, meaning it takes a lot of energy to heat up, water heater is one of the largest energy consumers out of all of the household appliances. If you can reduce usage of your hot water, you can see the difference in your electric bill. If you live in colder areas, you might be able to see even greater difference in your electric bill. The downside of it is that, you’ll probably have to deal with rinsing your dishes in a 50 or 60-degree water, which may not be as easy to handle.

So when the new bill came, I was pleased. It was around $178! My husband didn’t believe me that turning off the garage freezer would make much difference, so it was nice to confirm by opinion, “See, I told you so!”

Average clothes washer uses 40 gallons of water per cycle.  Its energy use will depend on the cycle’s water temperature.  The hotter the temperature, the more energy it will use.  The mechanical operation of washer itself does not consume a lot of energy.

You can find out how much power your washer uses by checking out Find Energy Use by Appliance. So here are some tips:

• Choose a cycle with cold rinse, rather than warm or hot rinse.  It is not the “washing” part that takes a lot of water, it is the “rinsing” part.  So washing in hot or warm water won’t consume nearly as much energy as rinsing in hot or warm water.
• Choose a cycle with automatic temperature sensor.  This way the washer will use appropriate amount of cold water to accommodate for the required temperature setting, potentially saving energy on hot water use.
• Try to maximize clothes load every time you use a laundry machine.

By Malika Risley

I love giving gifts!  I feel good when I see the excitement on the recipients’ faces as they are about to find out what they got.

Mystery is an important part of gift giving.  We conceal the gifts before we give them away.  It’s the feeling of surprise and anticipation that gets everyone so excited about getting a gift.  Wrapping a gift is not a matter of practicality, it’s a matter of delivering emotion.

But paying for something that is going to get torn apart and thrown away just doesn’t seem right to me. At the same time I don’t want to look like a total cheapskate when my present is being unwrapped. So I still wrap my gifts and make them presentable. I just improvise on the materials.  Here is what I do to save money on gift wrapping:

• At times I run into gift bags for $1 or less at stores like Big Lots, Wal-Mart, Dollar Store.  I buy a few that don’t have any particular theme to them.  This way I can use them for any occasion, especially if I’m in a hurry and don’t have time for wrapping.
• I use free gift-wrapping service when available.
• I reuse gift bags that were given to me.  I remove the card that comes with the bag and make a new one using a hole puncher.  I attach a new card to the handle by untying the knot on the inside and then tying it back.
• I buy wrapping paper during after-holiday sales.  I find deals for 25-50 cents per roll.
• I pick up cardboard boxes at the retail stores when they are restocking the merchandise.  Hey, they’re free and they make a good gift box. I have to cover them with the gift wrapping paper though.
• I save paper bags from my groceries and use them as wrapping paper.
• Instead of bows and ribbons, I use yarn.  I pay $2 for 200 yards of acrylic yarn.  That covers a boat load of presents and then some!

Guess what, by reusing you’re doing a favor to the environment, since you’re generating less waste!

Happy Holidays!

Water Heater is the second largest contributor to the energy bill after the air conditioner/central heat. Water has high heat capacity, so it takes a lot of energy to warm up. For example, it takes one kilowatt-hour to warm up about 10 gallons of water from 80F to 120F. Your electric or gas bill is noticeably affected by how much hot water you use in your house. That includes showering, clothes washer, dishwasher. Here are some general guidelines for how you can reduce your water heater energy use:

Washing Dishes

• Set water heater’s temperature at no higher than 120F, especially if you don‘t have a temperature sensor on your dishwasher or clothes washer. Here is why, it takes 1 kilowatt-hour to heat up 10 gallons of water from 80F to 120F. If your water heater’s thermostat is set at 140F, it will take 1.46 kilowatt-hour to heat up the same 10 gallons of water. That is almost one and half times more energy for the same amount of water. If your dishwasher does not have a temperature sensor, it will use the same amount of water from your water heater, whether its temperature is 120F or 140F. Most dishwashers have a minimum water temperature requirement of 120F, so any temperature above 120F would not make a difference in cleanliness of dishes.
• If you have to rinse your dishes before you put them into the dishwasher, rinse them with cold  water. Cold water does not require energy input.
• If you don’t like the idea of rinsing dishes with cold water, rinse them with warm water but don’t open the faucet all the way.  Open it just enough to get some flow and it will be just as effective as having the faucet fully open.  It will significantly reduce your hot water use.  Here is a test you can do.  All you need is a bucket of known volume (they usually come in 3- or 5-gallon sizes) and a stop watch.  Place the empty bucket in your kitchen sink, turn on the faucet at the same flow you usually rinse or wash your dishes and use a stopwatch to time how long it takes to fill up the bucket.  Then do the same experiment with using the low flow.  Here is what I got from my test:

1. The first time it took me just under 1 minute to fill up at 3-gallon bucket, Assuming that it takes you 10 minutes to rinse/wash your dishes, with the average water temperature of 100F, you will use up 30 gallons (3 gal * 10 min = 30 gal) of water at 100F. It will take 1.46 kilowatt-hours total to rinse your dishes (assuming your cold water is 80F, if it is lower, it would take more energy).
2. When I timed my low flow conditions, it took me 8 minutes to fill up the same bucket. This time my flow was 3gal/8min = 3/8 gallons per minute. For 10 minutes I would use 30/8 = 3.75 gallons total. It would only take me 0.183 kilowatt-hours to wash my dishes. That is (1.46/0.183= 7.98) almost 8 times less energy use!

To find out how much energy your dishwasher uses, see my post Find Energy Use by Appliance. Dishwashers use between 4 and 6 gallons of water per cycle.  Energy Star dishwashers use 4 gallons and non-Energy Star use 6 gallons.

Showering

Average flow from the shower head is 2.5 gallons per minute.  So if you are taking a 10-minute shower, you are using 25 gallons of warm water.  It takes 1.3 kilowatt-hours to heat up this much water from 80F to 100F and double that if the cold water temperature is 60F.

• Now days market is flooded with all kinds of low-flow shower heads.  My shower head has a lever that adjusts the water flow by adjusting the size of the holes for the water to flow through. Low-flow shower heads use up to half of the flow of regular shower.
• Another no-brainer is to take shorter showers!

Washing Laundry
Average clothes washer uses 40 gallons of water per cycle.  Your energy use will depend on the cycle’s water temperature.  The hotter the temperature, the more energy it will use.  So here are some tips:

• Choose a cycle with cold rinse, rather than warm or hot rinse.  It is not the “washing” part that takes a lot of water, it is the “rinsing” part.  So washing in hot or warm water won’t consume nearly as much energy as rinsing in hot or warm water.
• The operation of washer itself does not consume a lot of energy.  You can find out how much power your washer uses by checking out Find Energy Use by Appliance.

As a general guideline for the water heater, if you are leaving town for few days, it is good to turn off the water heater as well.  This way it will not use the energy to maintain the set temperature.  In the perfect system, all of the heat would stay within boundaries of the heater.  This is not the case in the real world, some of the heat does escape to the surroundings.  If you go and touch your water heater, more likely it is going to be warm (if it is on).  This is the heat escaping to the surroundings.

You can calculate power usage of any appliance by finding a label that shows how much current (in amps or A) and the voltage (in volts or V) it uses. The amount of voltage appliance draws can vary, depending on the appliance. Maximum voltage is what you usually find on the appliance’s info panel. For example, a clothes dryer has multiple power settings, depending on the temperature setting for a given load of clothes. So voltage draw depends on the dryer’s operating temperature. Higher voltage draw is required with higher temperature.

In some cases the label tells you how many watts (W) an appliance uses to operate. A watt is a product of amp and volt (W = A * V).  In this case you don’t need to look for volts or amps.  Such labels are usually found on the door or the door opening of the dishwasher, clothes dryer, on the back side of the iron…  In case you are having a hard time finding it on the appliance itself, you can find it in the appliance’s operation manual.  Use this formula to calculate how much power it uses in kilowatt-hours (KWHRs). One kilowatt-hour equals to 1000 watt-hours. For your estimation you will need to know how many hours (HRs) per month the appliance is running.

KWHRs = A * V / 1000 * HRs    or

KWHRs = W / 1000 * HRs

Keep in mind that even if the appliance’s ON switch is on, it doesn’t mean that it draws the same amount of power all the time it stays on.  For example, even though refrigerator is plugged into the wall all the time, it turns on and off automatically.  So, when it is ‘ON’ (you hear a light buzzing sound coming from it), it draws the power according to its label, and when it is ‘OFF’, it draws a very insignificant amount of power.
Calculations for estimating power use by the water heater are more complicated, but if you are curious enough, then read on.

To find out how much power appliance is using due to its hot water use, you need to know how many gallons of water your appliance uses, the temperature of your water heater’s thermostat setting and the temperature of cold water in your house.
Use following calculation:

(# of gallons of water) * 8.33 * (hot water temp F – cold water temp F) / 3413 = #KWHRs used

To estimate how much money it costs to operate, find out how much your electric company charges per kilowatt-hour from your energy bill.

# KWHRs * $/KWHR = $

Example:
According to the label, my dishwasher uses 120 volts and 2.7 amps and say it takes approximately 1 hour to complete the wash cycle.  My dishwasher is Energy Star, so it uses 4 gallons of hot water per cycle.  Since I live in Florida, I’m assuming my cold water is 80 F and my water heater’s thermostat is set at 125 F.  My electric company charges 10.5 cents per kilowatt-hour.  So a load of washing dishes in my dishwasher costs me:
120 volts * 2.7 amps / 1000 * 1 hour = 0.324 KWHRs
(4 of gallons of water) * 8.33 * (125 F – 80 F) / 3413 = 0.439 KWHRs
(0.324 + 0.439) KWHRs * $0.105 = $0.08