There are a lot of cloth diaper blog posts out there that try to break down the cost of cloth diapering and prove how “over time” it will be cheaper than disposables. Well what if you find yourself low on diapers, low on money, with only a few more months of diapers ahead?
My son is 20 months and I plan on using a 3 day potty training method once he turns 22 months. Supposedly this should work well and we will be done with diapers by then. Supposedly. But about a month ago I was facing a budget with numbers that didn’t put my family in the black by the end of the month, and I was sick of spending $40+ a month on diapers. So I did what any good hippie would do and I looked into cloth diapers.
$20 fraggin’ dollars a diaper??!?! Are you kidding me??! If I got the recommended number (minimum of 12) I would spend $240 bucks on cloth diapers. Not to mention the garbage/diaper pail, pail liners or garbage bags, extra laundry costs, etc… W. T. F.?? These cloth diaper hippies are the biggest capitalists out there, I told you so! $240 would keep my baby in disposables for the rest of his diaper time, and allow me to stock pile 2 months worth of diapers for the next one. One website said the average income of a cloth diapering family is $90k a year. In a word, I felt screwed.
The point here was to save money NOW. I had about $40 worth of disposables diapers stock piled and my goal was to spend less than the $120 I will spend on disposables if we stay in those until January. So what I did was buy 2 diaper wraps/covers, 1 trial pack that came with 1 cover and 3 prefolds, 6 flat diapers, and 6 more prefolds. This was about $55 all together, and I split it up into two purchases. My son still uses disposables at naptime and bedtime, and when we are out and about. But the rest of the time when we are home, he’s in a cloth diaper. Every 4-5 cloth diapers used equals a $1 saved on disposables!
I even made my own cloth baby wipes. Did you know hippies try to sell these for $10 for 12 wipes? HAHAHAHA. I cut up a baby blanket and got about 48 wipes. CAPITALISTS!!!
Anyway… Moral of the story, I am stretching our stockpile of disposable diapers, saving money, and not adding as quickly to the landfill. Who’s the hippie now, suckas?
(mis)Adventures in domestic goddessing 