'I may have overspent during this pregnancy': TOWIE star Lauren Pope talks budgeting for a baby

Becoming a new parent comes with a fair bit of excitement and nerves, but an extra part to consider is the money involved in buying your newborn everything they need.

Speaking on Yahoo UK’s parenting series, The Baby Bump with Lauren Pope, mum-of-three and personal finance expert, Lynn Beattie, also known as Mrs Moneypenny, suggested some ways to save the pennies when it comes to buying baby bits.

Pope - who is 36 weeks pregnant with her first baby - said: “I may’ve overspent during this pregnancy, but it seems you need so much stuff to bring a baby into this world and it piles up, it’s so overwhelming.”

Pope’s relatable admission is something many new parents would’ve experienced, but Beattie is adamant that there are ways to make this life transition cheaper, without scrimping on quality.

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It’s important to know that the biggest outlay you’re likely to have comes from the first baby, because after that children will get hand-me-downs from their older siblings.

While these hand-me-down moments become quite anecdotal at the dinner table as you get older, they’re definitely handy for parents wanting to save a bit of money.

“It’s really different when it’s your first pregnancy because you’ve almost got this pressure and this expectation on you that you want to have everything you possibly should for your child because you don’t know what you’re going to need,” Beattie explains.

From experience, the finance expert believes that the lists brands put together of things you’ll need when the baby arrives are “too much”.

“It’s literally everything you could possibly need. I think you just have to be really realistic about number one, how much budget you’ve got and number two, take it with a pinch of salt. It’s a marketing ploy and they’re putting out those lists to make you buy everything from them.”

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When it comes to the nice-to-haves, it’s important to weigh up your budget, but what about the essentials like the pram and the travel system?

For Beattie, the middle ground is always a good place if you’re looking to save money on this sort of thing.

“I looked at the really expensive stuff, I looked at the cheaper stuff and I ended up going somewhere in the middle with a lie-flat pram that turned into a pushchair that was also a travel system as well.

“Try to combine everything in one and shop the internet. There’s a really great website called Idealo where you can put in the product you’re looking for and it’ll tell you the cheapest website to buy it on.

“There are some really simple tools that make research a lot quicker.”

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It’s also important to remember that you don’t need to deck out your nursery from the moment your baby is born, because, as Beattie says, the baby is likely to sleep in a bed beside your bed for the first six months.

This might help to spread the cost out over a longer period of time.

“You don’t know what your baby is going to be like, so try not to buy too much when you’re pregnant because you’re not going to know what they like yet.”

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