Today at work I was in a panic.
I am 18 weeks pregnant and my finances aren’t perfect. I worried about my maternity leave. Our temporary disability insurance at work only covers up to $175 per pay check. I thought about health insurance and the outrages cost to cover a family. On my insurance at work, to cover just the mother and child, about $280 is taken out of your pay check each pay period.
How can anyone survive on what is left, especially in NYC?
Benefits for women in my situation are very limited. It’s very discouraging when the benefits of being on Welfare seem to have more advantages than going back to work in three months. I don’t want to be on Welfare unless it is absolutely necessary. I don’t feel I’ve gotten to that point.
My quest this week is to find ways to help my situation without having to stop work once I have the child.
One benefit of being in NY, is that they have a good HHC program. http://www.nyc.gov/html/hhc/html/access/hhc_options.shtml
My husband and I are going to look into this tomorrow. Affordable health insurance will reduce the stress on our newly forming family. I’ve heard good things about it for being a public hospital program. It’s worth a call this week.
We also started a $5 fund. Every time we get a $5 bill in our change from the store. We put it away. We have collect about $1000 since March. We are going to step it up and put $150 from every pay check. It’s going to hurt us now, but it is manageable with proper budgeting. It will benefit greatly when I am on maternity leave.
These are some of the ideas we came up with today. I think this will benefit us in the long run. Talking of my panic with my husband helped a lot today. I hadn’t told anyone how I was feeling because I felt that I was over reacting. Talking to my husband, I found out that I wasn’t the only one. Now, we can work together to make this a little easier on ourselves.
A World Of Many 