Pregnant Woman Lives on $20 a Day
Photo courtesy of Emily Kaye Lazarro
Expecting a child brings about a lot of changes — the biggest of all, having to account for another human, of course. But just as pregnant Emily Kaye Lazzaro was starting to prepare for all of the new things life with a baby brings, she suddenly had to make another major adjustment she wasn’t prepared for: overhauling her growing family’s finances.
After the 29-year-old self-described multi-hyphenate (playwright, actor, blogger, screenwriter, tutor, and babysitter) and her husband, Bill Lazzaro, recently made a property tax mistake that requires them to pay an extra $500 a month to settle their bill, the two had to re-evaluate their expenses. To do so successfully, the couple from Somerville, Massachusetts, challenged themselves to be more conservative with their spending and allocated $20 a day for each of them for a month. That single Andrew Jackson had to cover food, travel, gas, parking, clothes, and additional incidentals such as dry cleaning and concert tickets.
Yet deciding what was a bill and what was an elective expense turned out to be more difficult than expected. For example, health expenditures that once seemed indispensable fell by the wayside. It was decided that therapy copays were bills, but visits to the chiropractor were a voluntary expense (and certainly cost more than $20). As for medications, at one point Emily Lazzaro found that she had run out of Tylenol, which was one of the only medications she could safely take while pregnant (and without the visits to the chiropractor, her back required it).
“My husband will participate in almost anything that he perceives to be a game or that may involve points,” Lazzarro wrote in a blog post that originally appeared in the Billfold. But while she might have been tricking her husband into participating, she knew that sticking to the modest financial plan (which they kicked off on June 5) wouldn’t be a temporary experiment but rather a lasting lifestyle change. “We had to do this so that we would survive and not go bankrupt and not have zero dollars when I left all my jobs to care for this baby full-time, which is likely to happen as none of my jobs pay enough to cover day care.” And babies, as any parent knows, are expensive: According to BabyCenter, taking into consideration every possible thing that parents have to purchase (from infant nail clippers to car seat), the average cost of a newborn’s first year is $10,158.
Many people make it work with similar and even more constraining financial limits every day, considering the federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. But the cost of living is expensive, and living well can be more difficult. Lazzarro told Yahoo Health that the most difficult part of changing her spending habits while also being pregnant was eating healthfully. “It’s cheaper to eat really unhealthy food,” she said in the interview. On average, feeding a family of four a nourishing diet can run between $146 and $289 per week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reports. But to make it work, Lazzarro started shopping at a discount grocery store instead of Whole Foods, stopped overbuying food, and purchased ingredients instead of premade meals.
By the end of June, Lazzarro, who is now 28 weeks pregnant, went above her allocated amount by only $1.57 and her husband by $3.59. The experience to date has been enlightening, and they’ll continue with the challenge, although they’ll still think of it as a way of life as opposed to a game. “It’s become a necessity for right now,” Lazzarro said. “It’s really good training for us just to get our mindset into budgeting.”