People are always saying that children are expensive. And with a stroller worth more than our car I guess I would agree. Parents love to point out how expensive diapers are. Individually they aren’t a fortune, but since they are disposed after each urination/defecation, it certainly adds up. Let’s see if we can minimize the costs.
Prior to birth
I thought I was pretty smart by buying diapers with my Staples credit which meant no money out of my pocket. They were an off-brand and I bought 200 for $32 which is a respectable 16 cents a diaper. You can get Huggies at Costco for 21 cents a diaper. 5 cents may not seem like much, but it is about $5 a week as our baby goes through 100 diapers.
Best deal
I recently made a purchase at 8 cents a diaper! Better yet, it was Huggies and from Amazon. Here is how to do it:
Registry: 20% off the first $300 of spend. To qualify for the discount you have to have $500 of items purchased from the registry, then you can get the discount after the listed date of arrival.
Subscribe and save: 20% off deliveries with 5 or more items, otherwise 5% off. Ideally you can subscribe to items you actually need, but if you are short, there are items you can subscribe to for $1.50. So as long as you spend $30 on diapers, it would make sense to add 4 really cheap products to get the 20% off.
Coupons: I recently bought when there was a $20 off $100 and $10 off two selected products. Coupons happen sporadically, so when you see it, it makes sense to jump on it.
All of these stack for amazing prices. Here is a picture of a recent purchase. I bought 2x 128 packs which cost $48.54. Then I made sure to have 5 items for February delivery to get 20% off which was $9.71, then another 20% was granted for my registry. Finally, there was a $10 off two selected items. So it when from $48.54 to $19.12 which is 60% off and 8.1 cents a diaper. Things to note are that as the size increases then number of diapers in the package decreases, so your price per diaper will increase.
Conclusion
5000 diapers for the first year is crazy. If I could keep the 8 cents this would mean a reasonable $400, however, if I got some of the more expensive ones at 30-40 cents that would be $1,500 to $2,000 (the entire child tax credit). I love optimizing, so figuring out the best deal has been loads of fun. However, really the best deal is cloth diapers. We may give it a go, but we are currently traveling so we didn’t want to attempt it yet.