Learning that you’re pregnant with twins is an exciting time, but it’s also immediately obvious that the family budget will need to change to accommodate the two new bundles of joy.

Prepare financially for twins by understanding your current budget, estimating the costs of pregnancy, labor and newborn care and either decreasing your spend or increasing your income to afford the difference in family costs.

In this article, we’ll cover the costs associated with having twins and how to afford it without additional stress or dramatically changing your standard of living.

Understand Your Current Pre-Baby Budget

It’s impossible to adjust your spending in a meaningful way if you don’t know how much you’re spending to begin with. That’s why the first step in preparing financially for twins is to understand what’s currently coming in and going out.

Creating a written budget ensures you understand your financial landscape and can revisit, make notes and share with your significant other for joint financial planning.

When creating your budget, write down your fixed costs

• Monthly Income: W2, side hustle, or passive income you have access to for spending
• Fixed monthly costs: rent/mortgage, internet, gas and electric, HOA, phone plans, credit card debt or loan payments
• Variable monthly costs: groceries, gas, eating out, travel, fun
• Variable annual costs: car or home maintenance

For the most accurate understanding of your budget print your bank and credit card statements for the previous three months to create an average spend in each of these spending categories.

Next, estimate how much to save for your variable annual costs each month by dividing those larger annual expenses by 12.

Finally, subtract your monthly costs (including the monthly estimate for your variable costs) from your monthly income. Calculating your W2 income, but you may have to use a conservative estimate for any side hustle or passive income to make sure your budget works on a “slow” month.

Ongoing Costs to Include in your baby budget

Medical Bills

Even if you have a decent medical plan, it’s important to budget for higher costs during pregnancy, delivery and post-partum.

If your twins are sharing a placenta, there’s the possibility of an unequal share of resources (called Twin Twin Transfusion Syndrome) so mom will have to get more sonograms than with a singleton pregnancy. And once the babies are here, you have regular doctor’s appointments, colds, fevers and all the other fun things that come with human healthcare.

Formula

Breastfeeding becomes twice the task when you’re feeding for two. It’s common for many moms to supplement the breastmilk with formula to keep up with the high demand for food – especially in the early days where babies need to feed once every three hours.

If you’re unable to breastfeed your twins, you’re in for a real hit to the pockets with the formula because 1 32-oz can of Gerber Good Start Gentle Pro (the formula we’re currently using for our twins) costs us $36.48. We run through 3-4 cans per week.

Diapers & Wipes

With 6-8 diaper changes a day per baby, twins can easily run through 12-16 diapers per day. At an average cost of $0.25 per diaper, twin parents can spend up to $4 per day on diapers alone.

Luckily, we haven’t had to buy any diapers yet because we requested that everyone attending our baby shower bring a box of diapers and we ended up with enough diapers to build a fort.

Using cloth diapers can save you a ton in this arena.

Daycare

Depending on where you live, daycare costs can break a parent’s budget. According to care.com’s 2022 cost of care study, the average child care cost for one child in 2021 was $694/week for a nanny, $226/week for a day care center and $221/week for a family care center – and it’s increasing. Parents are struggling to pay for childcare and making tough decisions like taking on a second job or leaving the workforce all together to afford care.

Avoid daycare costs by asking for help from friends and family or moving in with family after giving birth if that’s an option for you.

You can also try watching your children while you work from home to reduce or eliminate the cost of care.

Explore all options for Healthcare

Review pricing for adding children to both parent’s health plans

If both parents are working full time jobs, it’s likely that both parents will have access to a healthcare plan for the children. Different companies offer different health plans and have usually negotiated different pricing within the organization. Adding children to your family is a life event that allows you to update your healthcare plan with your company outside of the usual open enrollment period.

Explore the price of adding children to both parents healthcare plans. Different workplaces will offer different types of healthcare plans at different costs based on the pricing they’ve negotiate with health insurance companies.

Ask for pricing when making doctor’s appointments

Saving money on raising children doesn’t stop at lowering costs on paying for health insurance. You will also have to make sure that every appointment you set for your babies (and yourself) are as efficient as possible. You want to get the best possible healthcare at the lowest price.

Ask what the price will be for any healthcare services before solidifying your appointment with any doctor, from primary health care providers to eye doctors or specialized care. It’s tempting to ask whether the doctor’s office takes your insurance, but that’s not enough because healthcare providers have all negotiated different rates for their services. Even if your insurance is accepted, you’ll want to check the rate for that doctor that you’re expected to pay after insurance before accepting the appointment.

Shop around for the best doctors and prices before finalizing your appointments

Even if you’re satisfied with the out of pocket cost, it could be helpful to check other doctors in the area that provide the same service to make sure that you’re getting the best possible rate on your services. Unless there’s a special reason you want to pay more, you can shop around for your healthcare like you would any other service.

We had a terrible experience with this during my twin pregnancy. Because our twins were sharing a placenta, we had to get sonograms every two weeks during our pregnancy. Our doctor referred us to a facility that charged us over $2500 for a single sonogram, after insurance. We didn’t get our bill until after the second sonogram, which cost over $1500. In total, two sonograms were over $4000.

We feared going into medical debt and stopped getting the sonograms we needed to make sure our children were safe and healthy. We believed we couldn’t afford them.

We had to switch doctors midway through our pregnancy and the new doctor referred us to a different facility for our sonograms. Each sonogram there was around $100 and we were able to track our children’s health throughout the pregnancy without fear or massive debt.

Even though both sonogram facilities were “covered by insurance” the price and coverage varied wildly.

How To Lower Your Infant Costs

Invite Lots of People to Your Baby Shower

One of the best ways to stock up on baby items without paying for them yourself is to have your friends and family gift them to you!

Some people choose to keep their baby shower guest list small to keep the cost of the baby shower down, but if you host an inexpensive baby shower, you can still have a large guest list and allow your friends and family to help you out with some of these baby costs.

Here’s a list of recommended items you’ll definitely want to ask for at your baby shower.

Use Your Local Library

Babies will not be super interested in toys or books for the first year. While it’s nice to read to them and engaged them with different things so they can practice those motor skills, you don’t have to pay for these items yourself all the time. Check your local library for baby books you want before buying them and use your local library to use baby toys.

Pay off debt

You can release some future funds by paying off significant debts. Every month, your debts add to your monthly bills to your plate. Paying off credit card, car loan or student loan debt, releases those funds to your bank account for spending on family food, diapers or savings later on down the line. Instead of having a monthly payment for your past purchases that money will now be available for you to afford necessities for your new family or live more comfortably.

Get Hand Me Downs from Friends, Family or Buy Nothing Groups

Many infants will only wear most of their clothes a few times or grow too quickly to use some of their clothes at all so it’s a great idea to spend as little as possible on these items.

Lower your spending in other areas

Spending for your children is only one area of your full budget. Return to your overall budget and interrogate each line item to see if there are any areas where you could benefit from frugality.

• Could you meal prep to save money on weekly takeout or expensive meals out?
• Could you move into a lower cost of living area or downsize save money on housing?
• Could you walk or bike more to save money on gas and reduce the wear and tear on your car?
• Can you renegotiate some of your recurring bills like car or home insurance?
• If you haven’t already, can you cut cable?

The three biggest line items in most American’s budgets are housing, transportation and food. Focusing on these big three areas can help you improve your overall budget in a meaningful way.

While reducing your budget, be sure to keep things you care most about in your budget. This isn’t the time to cut your annual family vacation where you’ll create meaningful experiences with the people you love. Instead, it’s your opportunity to switch your spending habits in areas that don’t bring you joy to have funds for the things you most care about.

Get creative with babysitting

Whether you need full-time care so you can work during the day or part-time care for date nights, childcare can add a large line item to your budget.

The average babysitter runs $15-20 per hour and full time childcare can run anywhere from $325/week – $500/week depending on your local market and the age of your children.

• Live with family to get free babysitting
• Ask friends to babysit for you
• Hang out with friends in a kid-friendly environment
• Arrange work hours around the times you will have care for children.

Increasing Your Income To Accommodate Twins

Luckily, lowering your costs by frugality isn’t the only way to afford the new lifestyle with a larger family. You can also work to earn more money and you may not have to increase your working hours, depending on how you choose to pursue and increase in income.

Ask for a raise at your current job

Pregnancy is a long term experience that guarantees you won’t be surprised about when your twins are coming. That means you have time to build a case for a raise at work. You can step up to deliver a big project, help to train team members and document that value to your company to make your case. If you haven’t received a raise in a while, this can be a great opportunity to look up the market price for your role to see if your wage has kept up with the market as a whole.

Change jobs to increase your pay

The average worker sees a pay increase of 10.2% when changing jobs, according to research by Pew Research Center.

Reskill to get a better paying job

If you’re in a role that traditionally doesn’t pay well it could be time to make a career switch into a higher paying industry.

Service-based side hustle

One sure-fire way to make extra cash is to put in a few extra hours working in a service-based side hustle.

Service based side hustles are where you paid immediately for labor, like driving for uber, dog sitting or dog walking, babysitting or administrative tasks on sites like upwork or taskrabbit. While other side hustles like blogging or YouTubing can have a very long runway to build up before seeing any cash at all, a service-based side hustle will make money as soon as you complete the task.

Stay with family and rent your home

One of our favorite ways to make “passive” income is by renting our home on Airbnb. During the end of our pregnancy and the first 6 months post-delivery, we stayed with my parents and rented our primary home.

The great thing about renting a home is that you don’t have to do a ton of work beyond providing the home to your guests and making sure it’s clean between guests. We hired a cleaner to clean the home between guests and set up a few automated messages to help guests self check-in and out of the home and we were able to make an additional income without much additional work.