- Postpone big expenditures if you can. Don’t make this the year that you buy new furniture, a new car, or a computer. Unless the one you’ve got is broken, keep it going for a while longer.
- Take a year off from saving. Although this is heretical advice to a retirement planner, if you’re really short on cash, you could reduce your long-term savings for one year without putting yourself in the poorhouse in old age.
- Prioritize expenses and talk to your partner regularly about money. This is really the key. If staying home for a year is a very high priority for the two of you, then you can make the decisions together about how you will pay for it and you can both feel good about the trade-offs you make to do it. If either of you feel like you are the only one making sacrifices, it will be bad for your relationship and difficult to plan. But, if you believe that together, you are doing the best thing for your new family, you’ll feel great about what you are accomplishing and you won’t miss the meals out or new gadgets and clothes for yourselves. Instead, you’ll be enjoying your baby’s first year of life and focusing on what you value most: spending that time with your child.
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