Ask HN: Just found out that I’m gonna be a dad

If you have inconsistent income you have to have a healthy buffer of cash that you can draw from in times where you aren't making a lot of money. Congratulations on becoming a dad!

Congrats!

Diversify the income stream. If you make most of your money freelancing, consider doing some pluralsight courses or writing a book. I highly recommend reading this article [1] from Troy Hunt (creator of HaveIBeenPwned) on some of the finance lessons he's learned.

You might also look at working part time with a regular client at a cheaper rate, or modifying your contract to ensure more regularity, especially if you can manage to get benefits.

[1] - https://www.troyhunt.com/10-personal-finance-lessons-for-tec...

A wild political change of views from libertarian to conservative appears..

You always have the option to switch careers.

Congrats! As someone else said, make sure you have a healthy buffer of cash. Unexpected doctor visits come up, you'll want to take the kid somewhere and they go through diapers really fast in the beginning. Also make sure you and your partner can communicate and have plans for sleeping and babycare. My son is just two months and we've finally figured out a sleep routine since we had both been getting up when we started to fuss or cry at night to eat. If you need any advice, have questions, or just want to talk I can send you my email.

Congratulations!

1. Get a health insurance for you and your wife if you don’t already have one. That takes care of large unexpected costs.

2. Make a budget for next 2 years. This will show how much money you might actually need.

3. Build savings from today. You should be able to make good savings by the time your baby is born.

4. Not sure what you do. If possible find a way to build long term relationships with your clients.

5. Doing 2 projects, about half time for each is also a good idea. Gives you a safety net.

6. Choose clients that have good cash flow. Funding or profitability.

It’s important not to freak out now. Your wife needs a lot of support and you should be there. Also, first time dads under estimate the support they will get from friends, family and the system in general. It should be manageable!

Budget. Make your inconsistent income look like a steady one and plan how you're going to spend the money.

I use YNAB, and they have a bunch of articles / videos / podcasts about variable income, such as https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=ynab%20variable%20inco...

Why can't you just buffer money on your business bank account, and thus give yourself a steady salary on a private account?

Congratulations! One thing, not as major as some of what other commenters have mentioned but worth knowing, is that you should not feel guilty about buying used clothes/cribs/etc. for your kid. 1) most baby clothes get worn very few times before they're outgrown, so you can get them in good shape at garage sales or thrift shops 2) your baby doesn't care whether it is dressed stylishly or not, it just cares if it's comfortable and its parents are nearby 3) your kid will likely throw up on it five minutes of putting it on anyway :)

Some parents feel guilt about buying used things for their child, and end up spending a lot of $$ on new clothes, crib, etc. for a child that will not benefit from all that extra expense in the least. You don't want to cut corners on, for example, health care or quality food, but things like clothes because they are visible can cause some parents of newborns to spend a lot of money they don't need to. Save it for the things that actually matter.

Save your money. Live to the lowest standard you can.

I had my business start to fail while my second was born. I thought I wouldn’t recover it. I did. It is survivable.

I now have three, but my income is still significantly down. Thriftiness and creativity will do you wonders. Budget and save, even if it’s a little bit.

Some wise financial advice I received as a young man went like this...

Those that make little but save a dollar are better off financially than those that make more but spend a dollar.

The stress of debt will do more harm to you than anything. Try to stay out of it, enjoy these next years, you’ll never get back your children’s early years, but you will always recover finances or a career.

Good luck!

Congratulations.

It's a good idea to have a list of must have's/nice to have supplies for the baby. Stick to the must have's, skip the others. You will spend less money and avoid having too much stuff afterwards.

The money you save this way you can use it as a buffer for the periods with limited income.

Beyond the advice of "healthy buffers of cash" - which is good advice - you might want to get your sleep now.

I don't mean that you should oversleep - since you want to balance your time in order build up as much cash as possible NOW...What I mean is: don't go out and party much now. You will not have enough sleep when your baby arrives, so sleep now.

Beyond cash and sleep, begin to work out a system (AHEAD of time) with your partner - including who will sleep while the other is on pager duty - er, I mean, feeding/diaper duty. In addition to organizing duties, communicate, communicate, and communicate with your partner NOW, DURING, and AFTER your baby arrives. Communication is so important during projects, and this is vastly more important than other projects, so it makes sense that communication with your partner is essential.

You (and your partner) are about to put a dent into the universe; cheers, congratulations, and best of luck!

Children are only expensive because we have a consumer mentality that we feel compelled to pass on to them.

Try cloth diapers. Make your own baby food (look it up). Avoid buying all that plastic, processed, unnecessary crap that is associated with childhood.

Child care can be very expensive. Avoid it by getting rid of as many monthly expenses as possible. You don't need cable. You don't need a cellphone--you can get by with a 7-year-old cellular Android tablet and a $15 per month data-only plan, then use dirt cheap VOIP for home and away. Don't eat anything that you did not cook yourself from raw ingredients. Don't go to restaurants. Don't get takeout. Don't buy anything processed.

This will put you in a position of not having to work extra hours to pay high monthly bills, so you can hopefully look after your child yourself instead of paying someone to do it.

Never buy anything new. People throw away children's clothing by the ton. Same with everything else. Start a reuse and clothing exchange/donation program in your building/area. You will drown in kid's clothing, toys, and supplies.

Also plan ahead. Use a condom now to prevent the additional stress that would come with another child in the future. One is more than enough. There's almost 8 billion of these things running around and we're well into environmental collapse because we can't seem to regulate our numbers.

What field are you in?

You could switch to a corporate job for steady income and it usually comes with decent benefits.

Honestly, you really want to budget very well. We are planning on having a child sometime next year. We created a plan. Bought a house, remodeled. Now, we are going to aggressively save $50k, so we can survive 12 months without any income if we ever need to. After we save $50k, we will focus on aggressively paying of the house, and investing 1k a month. My health is so so, therefore I am not sure how much time I got.

As far as career goes, I will most likely start consulting in a few years, as I have experience with the full life cycle of applications, even forcefully extracting requirements.

Congrats!

It really depends on your current situation, so to be more helpful please answer these:

1) how much savings do you have?

2) assuming a spouse, will the spouse continue to work? Do you have parents nearby who can help with childcare?

3) can you clarify your earnings, maybe with yearly breakdown of the past 5 years?

4) where are you located (country at least)?

Option 1) Get a regular job with health benefits. If you're a programmer in the US with some experience, $65-80K should be readily attainable. Certainly much more depending on location and abilities. Likely the least stressful but more boring option.

Option 2) diversify the income as vorpalhex said. This will be more stressful. You do need to figure out your "minimum expenses" and budget for that. You can't afford to go 1 year without making anything unless you've got significant money banked.

One datapoint: in a US midwestern city, a conservative baby/toddler budget is running me about $4-6K not including increased medical. Set a budget just assuming you're going to max your out-of-pocket every year. 1 birth + 1 ER visit will usually get you there.

Congrats!

Don't see much mention of it in other comments so for what it's worth.. don't underestimate the importance of being involved in a community. While I would personally suggest a church community, it could be anything as long as you're open to receiving help and giving it to others when you can. Nobody wants to feel like a charity case but anyone who has had kids understands how hard it is and people are often willing to give you a hand with babysitting occasionally or with food/supplies. Good luck and congratulations!

On a non-monetary note, here's some advice I gave my brother recently. (My daughter is now 15 months old, and I was thinking about what advice I wish I'd been given before she was born):

1) Remember at all times that no matter how tired you are, your partner is almost certainly much more tired. Basically, give her a free pass for the first few months, if not longer. (The hormonal changes a few days in are no fun either)

2) There is no point comforting a crying baby - they just don't understand what you're trying to do. Distract the fuck out of them instead. (This from a baby psychologist on a BBC documentary.)

3) Babies are their own tutorial. They start off really simple, with about three things to remember, and then once you've got the hang of those things they start adding new ones on. But you don't need to panic about whether you can do it, it's not complicated, just full on.

4) Bonding - do not panic if it takes you six months (or longer) to fall in love with your child. I certainly felt incredibly protective of Sophia from the moment she was born, but I didn't feel fully connected to her until she was able to smile at me, and we could have some kind of interaction. It's really easy to feel awful because all the TV and movies says it happens instantly, but it can take a fair while, so don't worry about it.

5) Ignore any advice you don't like.

https://andrewducker.dreamwidth.org/3746257.html

Congratulations. Not sure if this will work for you or not but this is what I did -

* Make sure you have a good health insurance plan.

* 529 account - the day my kids were born I started a recurring deposit 100 with some extra deposit on events like tax refund/bonus etc. I want to have enough to support public college tution.

* whatever I have left after mortgage and monthly expenses, I contribute to each of my accounts in specified order, going to next account only when I reach max limit for that account

     - Checking account (limit 2 months of expenses)

     - Online savings account for emergencies (limit 6 months of expenses)

     - Roth IRA for both my wife and me (limit IRS prescribed limit around 6K per year)

     - Retirement accounts (Robo advisors : regular investment account/IRA)

Plenty of people with less financial stability than yourself are parents and do just fine. The most important part, more than any other advice is to just show up. A lot of people overestimate what it takes to be a good parent. Be there, be present, and the rest tends to fall into place.

In my experience having a baby cost very little. There's an initial outlay for crib/buggy/etc, but you don't need to buy new - and if you have family nearby you probably can mostly use hand-me-downs (we did). Dunno where you live, but doctor visits for kids are free in a lot of Europe. Also - breastfeed!

Hey man, first off... no judgement intended, but look on Glass Door and make sure you're being paid appropriately for your line of work in your region. And... consider moving to a region that pays more. Just saying, $50k seems low for tech / anything that would bring you to the Hacker News community.

If you're freelancing, and sometimes you get paid and sometimes you don't, you need to work on getting clients to pay up-front (most are happy to do the first payment up-front at least), or at minimum make sure your contracts are solid and you're billing and following up for the work you did. (This is the bane of freelancing, and it gets more complex the more clients you have.) Fixing your contracts and invoicing will keep things consistent. Cut any client that doesn't pay on time, and never lift a finger to help someone who is behind on payments -- so many times people try and be "nice" but if they don't pay, they're just using you.

Generally speaking, so many issues are sorted out for you if you take a job at a bigger company. Stability, insurance, consistent pay... this is a huge draw for a lot of people. Freelancing is fun for diversity, and the pay can be better, but in the long-run most of my friends who work at big companies seem like they have more time for their families. Something to consider.

Savings is going to be key, and it's impossible to retroactively save, like it's impossible to retroactively diet, so you just fix the issues as you see them and try to avoid mistakes and stay healthy going forward. You need to find a way to get money saved up. It'll help with your stress. When I freelance, I try and keep 6 months of cash for all bills on hand. My mortgage, car payments, etc. -- should work dry up, I want runway to fix it.

The prerequisite to the above is having a budget. A lot of people just sort of spend what they spend, and don't think about it. This is lazy and wasteful. If you eat out a lot, set a budget... and consider scaling that down. When I first started tracking, I realized I was spending about $600 a month eating out. I cut that to $300 -- it was a bit harder at first, but I like cooking and meal prep, and within a year I went from eating out almost every meal to almost never eating out at all -- unless it's for work.

Once I had a budget, and my target savings goals, I got there by auditing my spend, and cutting expenses. Then putting aside 10% of my paycheck (for a few years), into paying off all debts and building savings. Once I hit the "cushion" goal, I still take 10% and put it into a 1) rainy day fund, and 2) retirement fund. The rainy day fund is for bigger purchases... things like, "Oh crap, I need a new AC," type stuff. It's invested, but it's more liquid -- I can turn it into cash inside of a week if needed.

For debts, it's not rocket science. Pay the ones with the higher interest rates first. Generally speaking. Credit card debt is horrible, and will doom you. Get it all paid off as quickly as you can. Then work on things like student loans, mortgages, etc. Keep in mind a lot of this debt helps you with your taxes... set up some time with a professional tax consultant and see what they say.

For a retirement account, and for a kid's college account, I just use a three-fund portfolio approach. https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Three-fund_portfolio It's simple enough, and I've beaten the market the last 10 years. Let the machines do it, I wasted money on a money manager for years... kicking myself. They always took 1% of my money... not just the profit. It was a rip off. And you can do this stuff yourself. (=

Setup some time to chat with a banker, but y'know... understand that they're out to make money too. If you're new to investing, they can help you with some of the basics... a Roth IRA, for example, if you don&#...

Congratulations, your life is about to change in all sorts of ways. One of them is that you are now responsible for others, not just yourself. Accept this, don't freak out and think Cooley and rationally what needs to be done.

My son was born less than a week after my 20th birthday. I had been doing odd software contracts to make money, but those weren't consistent. Here's what I did: I picked up 3rd shifts at McDonald's while recruiters floated my resume to a few companies. Yep. I had no college, no professional experience at anything, so I got the one job I could definitely get while I worked on making a better one possible (doing interviews, working on my portfolio, etc). Eventually I landed a full-time software job in a city 2 hours away. We moved down there and the rest is history. I should say that I was also buying baby food with WIC, and my parents provided a critical safety net when I would occasionally run out of money before payday.

Nowadays, I'm gainfully employed at a rate that disqualifies me from public assistance anywhere, and I have gotten all of my software jobs through Angel.co and Hired. I'm not the world's most talented engineer or likable person, but I've managed to work alongside some very talented and likable people. I think most people with an in-demand skill like software engineering can do what I did and make their way to a stable income that they can raise a family on.