There’s nothing like the weight of responsibility that comes with being a parent. Looking down at my newborn baby, just over three years ago, it hit me. I had to provide for this little person. It’s a pretty humbling experience to know that another person’s life is totally in your hands.

I know the (self-proclaimed) Northern Love Machine felt the same way. In fact, he had a bit of a wobble just after Frog came along, admitting to feeling overwhelmed and panicked by the enormity of our new role as parents.

When I found out I was pregnant we were living in a two bedroom flat in the centre of the town where we both worked. We chose that location because it was near to pubs and restaurants, clubs and shops. When we decided we wanted to have a baby, we knew we were ready to leave the out-every-weekend lifestyle behind us, so we moved out to a cottage in a little village. 

We saved up for the new baby’s arrival. I worked extra reporting shifts over the weekends, putting the money aside so that I could afford to take a full year’s maternity leave. We were looking at options to save in the best way, spending ages browsing online to find and Compare Savings Accounts with the best return that would still give us easy access to our cash when we needed it.

For me, the hardest thing about saving is making the choice to go without stuff you want when you have the cold hard cash sitting in front of you to buy it. Once we’d got our heads around not getting that takeaway because we couldn’t be bothered to cook, or not buying that brand new expensive piece of furniture, we were OK. Watching our money grow spurred us on to keep adding to it. It was satisfying and reassuring to know we had money to fall back on if we needed it.

About four months after Frog was born, we had another conversation about money. The savings we had worked so hard to build were now being dipped into and we needed to make some decisions about our future finances. When I was pregnant we were so focussed on saving for the maternity leave and the baby’s arrival, that we hadn’t been able to look much beyond that point.

I remember worrying, fretting over this big pile of money in the bank suddenly getting smaller. I hated spending it, even though we had saved it for that very purpose of enjoying maternity leave. Once I’d emerged from the newborn baby bubble and totted up the price of childcare alongside my salary, I decided not to return to my old job. I loved the job, but I also felt like I was ready for something new. I felt scared, but newly confident. Knowing that we needed to start saving again spurred me on.

When Frog turned six months old we talked about saving for a mortgage. It seemed like a distant dream, because the cost of houses in that part of the country was so high, plus lenders weren’t exactly giving mortgages away. But we held firm, saving everything that we could afford and working hard, because we wanted (eventually) to feel settled in somewhere we could call our own.

There is more to this story but I’m not ready to write it yet. Suffice to say, the last four years have been a time of saving and working and going without some things that, in the end, I didn’t miss anyway.

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