Guest Author - Kris Bigalk

When I found out I was pregnant with twins, I was thrilled and excited. But as the pregnancy progressed, I worried about the cost of raising twins. How much money would it take to make sure they were healthy, happy, and thriving?

The answer to this question is different for every family and situation, and can change. For example, I was determined to breast-feed my twins, but found that I just couldn't do it and remain sane. So, formula was added to our budget, unexpectedly. On the other hand, we had excellent health insurance, and paid little of the large medical bills incurred by our twins in their early days.

Here are the three major expenses parents face with twins in the first two years, along with suggestions on how to save money on these expenses.

Medical Bills
Fifty percent of twin births occur before 38 weeks gestation, which means the babies are often premature. A higher percentage of twin births are C-section, which means a longer hospital stay and possible complications for the mother. What all of this means is that parents expecting twins should prepare for the possibility that the babies and/or the mother will incur larger-than-singleton medical costs from the get-go. My twins, for example, were born at 36.5 weeks, and spent a week in the NICU, and then went back for four more days when one twin had apnea problems. The total bill for myself and the twins was around $70,000; but because I had good health insurance, we paid a family out of pocket maximum of $1,200. A year later, we were back in the hospital with one of the twins, as he had developed epilepsy. Again, the overall bill was large, around $30,000, but our co-pays were in the hundreds, not thousands, of dollars. Health insurance with a company you trust is imperative. If you don't have it when you get pregnant, have your spouse or yourself get it as soon as possible, so that well-baby visits and other necessary appointments during the first year are covered as well. If we would have had to pay for every appointment and immunization during the first two years of the twins' lives, we would have paid another $50,000.

Diapers
This is an expense there is no getting out of! We elected to use disposable diapers, and found that in the first few months of the twins lives, we would go through almost 200 diapers per week. As the twins got bigger, the number of diapers decreased, but the size increased, so that the cost of a week's worth of diapers pretty much remained constant—around $30 per week, if we bought generic "club packs" at Sam's Club or Costco. To save money, I suppose it would be possible to use cloth diapers with twins, if you really liked to do laundry. I don't.

Feeding
The first year of life, babies live mainly off of formula or breast milk. If you have an easier time breastfeeding than I did, you'll need to budget for a little more food for yourself—1,000 calories a day, to be exact. If you end up using formula, it is a considerably large expense. We spent $45 per week on formula, again buying the largest packages we could find at Sam's Club or Costco. When the twins turned one year old, I quickly weaned them onto straight cow's milk. Now we spend about $12 a week on milk and $5 a week on juice, when we buy it for $2.50 - $3 a gallon at Target or Sam's Club. If you qualify for the WIC program, by all means sign up and use the food vouchers, both while you're pregnant and while you're raising your kids. To find out more about WIC, see this link: http://www.fns.usda.gov/wic/