How to Make Cloth Diapering Affordable
When I had my first child, I was blissfully unaware about jut how much I would need for him. This was especially true when it came to diapers!
As a first time mom, I walked into the store and figured that the giant box of 180 diapers would have to last me a long time. At least 3 months… right?
Oh, so wrong.
Between not putting diapers on the right way, assuming that a diaper could only contain one pee and needed to be changed immediately, and a baby who really loved to poop (which is apparently totally normal)… I blew through that giant pack of diapers in less than a month!
I figured that $40 pack of diapers was going to last me at least 2 months! At the time, we were so, so, SO poor, so $40 was a lot of money. It was then that I first wanted to look into cloth diapering.
I’m sorry, $15 or more PER diaper?! And I need 20 of them!? What?!
It was so out of my price range, so I gave up and resigned myself to the fact that we’d have to do disposable diapers and just suck it up. Maybe next time…
Next time rolled around, and we were still living off of $17,000 for our now-family of four. Again, we had to use disposables. Until the baby was about 10 months old, when the skies opened up and a heavenly ray of light shone into my world and showed me the truth:
You don’t have to take out a second mortgage to afford cloth diapers!
It’s the truth! In fact, I was able to get enough cloth diapers for 2 children in diapers (ranging from newborn to 2 and a half) for around $200 total. Or, to put it in terms of disposables, less than the cost of 4 months worth of disposables for 2 children!
Here’s how I did it:
Zulily
Zulily almost always has some adorable cloth diapers for $9 or less. You mean, I don’t have to pay almost $20 per diaper?! Nope!
I bought a few “cute” diapers from Zulily so that if I wanted to let my babies walk abound in just a diaper, it looked like they were wearing a diaper cover or at least something other than a plain old diaper.
I’ve bought a few of these diapers from Zulily and I’ve loved them! But the price tag is still a little steep (even if it is half the price of the high-end cloth diapers).
Amazon
You can get anything off of Amazon, but I love them especially for their choices of inexpensive diapers!
THESE are the kind that I got for my sons for $33 for 6 of them, plus a wet bag!
I figured that I was paying around $5 for each of them and that if I broke them (because there’s a special way that you need to wash cloth diapers) or if they didn’t work properly, then I wouldn’t be too upset.
Amazingly, not only did I not break them, but I also love them! I’ve had the same set for almost 2 years of constant use and they’re still just as strong as ever.
I then bought all of my other cloth diapering supplies off of Amazon and continued to save a ton of money!
Bottom line here:
You don’t need to spend $400 or more on 20 diapers in order to cloth diaper your children!
- $126 for 14 diapers from Zulilly
- $15 for a diaper pail
- $15 for a diaper pail liner
- $120 for 4 packs of the 6 Amazon diapers
Brings my up-front cost for cloth diapering to $276 for 38 diapers!
I love my cloth diapers and I’m never going back to disposables!
Have you found a less expensive way to get cloth diapers?
Yes! Cloth diapers rock. I share some cloth diaper saving tips on my blog here: http://fromonemommatoanother2.blogspot.ca/2015/03/how-to-save-when-buying-cloth-diapers.html
The majority of my cloth diaper stash came from eBay and they were all used (by a mom with THREE kids who had all used the same dipes for over three years.) Instead of paying 18-20 dollars per diaper, I paid more like $10. I think I bought 16 or 18 on eBay. A friend gave us two cow print ones (the only cute print we had.) I only had one NEW pack of 6 and they were purchased by my grandma for my baby shower. We probably spent close to $300 to get set up (we have twins, so we needed a few more diapers than one baby would.) We had 26 diapers and that’s all we had for 3 years. We really only used them on the weekends and in the summer (when I’m off work) because daycare wasn’t too thrilled about the idea. I know we saved tons of money on disposables, and my washing routine got super efficient after a year or so 😉 At the time, I didn’t know a soul in real life who used any kind of cloth diapers except my grandmothers who had used the old fashioned cloth long ago. Now that my twins are 6.5, half of my friends use cloth and are always asking me for advice! I have another on the way and can’t wait to get my stash out and be able to say that it will be the 6th child wearing most of them! After this one, I’ll probably sell the whole lot and my accessories for a deep discount to someone I know, but at least I’ll make a little money back and get to help someone else!