Do you want to save money?
In this economic slump that we are experiencing, everyone seems to be pinching pennies. It is not uncommon to hear people talking about ways to save money and cut back on expenses. One area that most people probably don’t consider is diapers.
The average baby wears diapers for approximately 3 years. At an overall average of 8 diapers per day, most babies use an astounding amount of about 8700 diapers during their diapering days. Based on the cost of three popular national brands, the cost per disposable diaper is around $0.26. If you factor in the cost of disposable diaper wipes, about $0.04 per wipe, than you are looking at $0.30 for each diaper change. It doesn’t seem like much, but compiled over 3 years and the total cost adds up to approximately $2600. I don’t know about you, but I think that is a significant amount of money especially when it is for essentially TRASH. Unfortunately, this amount doesn’t even include such costs as diaper rash cream, extra trash collection fees, gasoline, etc.
On the other hand, cloth diapers seem so expensive when you start pricing them. How can you possible save money using such costly diapers? Well for a minimum of about $400, you can cloth diaper your baby for the entire 3 years. This is using the most inexpensive cloth diapering option of prefolds, diaper covers, and a few pocket diapers for nighttime. However, if you choose a more expensive option, such as pocket diapers or all in one diapers, you could potentially spend around $1200. Factor in the cost of laundering your cloth diapers which is about $400 for 3 years, including detergent, and you are looking at a total cost of about $800-$1500. This is a total savings of about $1000-$1800 over the cost of disposable diapers.
The numbers don’t lie, you really can save money by switching to cloth diapers. Use those same diapers for a second child and you save even more money. Isn’t it a nice feeling to be in control of how much money you are actually spending on your baby’s diapering rather than throwing away your hard earned cash on trash? The choice is yours.
This is the main reason we cloth diaper. All our kids have sensitive skin and have struggled with rashes. We switched over a year ago to cloth. On a rare occasion have used “sposies”, but find that they are sitting in them longer. With the cloth we use pre-folds and covers, have a couple of pockets for Dad and Grandma for ease of use. We have only rashes now due to antibiotic use on occasion but no where what they used to be. I am so glad come time to go to the store that I don’t have to buy diapers to add to my bill, we used to worry when they would get sick and get diarrhea or go though peeing a ton on a particular day that we would run out of diapers before payday. Now I just throw them in the wash and they are ready to go again. One time buy and life time use ; )
I think the author was very generous with her quotes on pricing for the costs of cloth diapers. I consider myself pretty thrifty in most situations and this is one of those situations where I find that we are REALLY saving! We just switched to cloth diapers about two weeks ago and spent a total of LESS THAN $200 to start diapering and are doing great! We normally spent about $20 every two weeks on disposable diapers. I only purchased a total of 5 bumGenius pocket diapers, one Happy Heiney pocket diaper, 15 prefolds and two Thirsties diaper covers. I wash the diapers every night. It’s a Small load and takes very little time to rinse, wash and dry. So far, my favorites are the bumGenius, with the prefolds close behind. The bumGenius pockets are just so simple to put on a squirmy nine month old! So, it will take me approximately six more months to recoup my initial cost (which I would have spent anyways) and I’ll break even. After that, I will essentially be saving $20 a week, minus the laundering cost. (We have three kids, so what’s another Small load a day?!)