INTRODUCING…

The Preparental Calculator

A tool to help you figure out the financial impact of your parental life choices – work, leave and childcare – on your household income and childcare costs.

Buy Now (£19)
WHERE YOU ARE NOW

You want to be sure you can afford to be a parent. But it feels like a leap into the financial unknown.

  • The “average costs” of having children seem baffling. How do they relate to your life?
  • How do you even start figuring out the costs, if you haven’t decided about childcare, leave and work yet?
  • Whether you’ll qualify for government schemes for help with childcare costs is a mystery to you.
  • You’re not convinced a financial adviser will be any help! (Don’t they just want to sell you stuff?).
THE COURSE CREATOR

Hi, I’m Helen, and I help people like you, to create affordable plans for parenthood

I have 20+ years experience in financial planning including as a Commercial Finance Director for a FTSE-100 company and running budget processes for companies like Virgin Media.

However, even my excellent adding-up skills didn’t help me, when I was approaching parenthood, to have much idea what it cost to have a child. I was baffled by some of the “average costs of a child” estimates – what did they include? Why didn’t they take into account some really obvious things like my lost income if I took maternity leave!?

I’ve created The Preparental Calculator (and its sister “done for you” service, The Financial PlanBuilder) to solve this problem.

The Calculator takes all the best data on childcare costs, all the government scheme eligibility rules and policies relating to parenthood, and combines this information with YOUR specific income, working patterns, assumptions and decisions, to show you what will happen to your income and childcare costs.

It’s designed to easily shed light on the affordability of your future journey into parenthood and assist your decision-making.

Helen Cammack, the founder of Preparental
Find Out More About Me

What’s Included

The Preparental Calculator is an online tool to help you run scenarios on the financial impact of different choices you might make as you become a parent.

Because this stuff is a bit complicated (even for those of us who are “good with numbers”), there are lots of short help videos to walk you through anything you might be unsure about (and if you’re still unsure, just ask!).

It’s designed to bring you clarity on what your finances might look like, depending on the choices you make on parental leave, working patterns, childcare, timing of children and location.

1 month’s unlimited use of the online tool

You’ll get 1 month to use the Calculator as many times as you want, downloading unlimited spreadsheets and creating unlimited scenarios (for your personal use only).

Help videos to help you with your assumptions

There are short help videos to help you get the inputs to the Calculator right, so you’re confident the outputs are going to be right too. The help videos will explain things like shared parental leave and how to classify different types of income.

Unlimited downloadable spreadsheets & charts

You’ll be able to download as many different scenarios as you like (for your personal use). Each scenario will be detail your assumptions and the implications over 10 years on your net (after tax) household income and childcare costs.

All your questions answered, for 1 month

Get as much support as you need to use the Calculator or ask clarifying questions, for 1 month, over WhatsApp or email. We are able to be very responsive in helping you get the most out of the tool.

Buy Now (£19)
HOW YOU’LL FEEL

Feel empowered to make decisions, confident of the cost

  • Build your confidence in how becoming a parent will affect your income, and what childcare will cost you.
  • Make decisions about parental leave, work post-kids, and childcare, confidently, understanding the costs
  • Work together with your partner to come up with a robust financial plan that works for both of you
Buy Now (£19)

For a limited time, join The Parenthood Planning Club for £19/month

The Preparental Calculator is included in The Parenthood Planning Club. Club membership is currently just £19 / month, and gives you the Calculator and SO much more!

Check Out The Club

YOUR QUESTIONS

You might be wondering….

Preparental is the home of parenthood planning, offering practical support to non-parents.

Preparental is a registered trademark, and Preparental Ltd is a limited company registered in England and Wales, with company number 14589489. The street address is Tiverton, South Road, Woking, GU21 4JS, United Kingdom.

Please read Preparental’s Terms of Use and Privacy Policy here.

To contact Helen at Preparental, email helen@preparental.com

Yes! All Preparental courses and tools are accessible as part of membership of The Club.

For as long as you’re a member of the Club, you’ll retain unlimited access to the Calculator (worth £19 per month). Find out more about The Club here.

No.

It’s not for anyone outside the UK, due to tax rules and costs that are specific to the UK. It’s also not for low income families who are on Universal Credit or Tax Credits. That’s because the Calculator currently doesn’t take into account benefits (except for child benefit). If you’re on Universal Credit you’re likely to be entitled to a large proportion (80%) of your childcare costs being paid for you. The Calculator does not include this. Let us know if you’re on Universal Credit or other significant benefits, and have purchased this in error and we’ll give you a refund.

Yes, yes, and yes.

It takes account of all of these benefits that you may be eligible for, in its final calculation of the financial impact on net household income after childcare.

To the greatest extent possible, it also takes into account regional variations in the UK – eg the difference between rules in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Yes.

We have a “done for you” service which starts with a video-guided questionnaire for you to fill in. It’s called The Financial PlanBuilder service.

If you use this service, we will run the numbers through the Calculator on your behalf (and we can also model additional scenarios that the Calculator can’t) and we’ll write you a report which explains everything, makes suggestions and recommendations, and runs through the impact of different scenarios.

Very.

When you are using the Calculator, it the tool temporarily saves your answers as you go along.

However, as soon as you come out of that session, your answers are not stored, and if you want to use the Calculator again, you’ll need to input your assumptions again.

The reason that it doesn’t save your answers is for privacy. We don’t want to collect and store information about your income and personal circumstances unless absolutely necessary.

What we recommend you do, once you are happy with the plan or scenario that you’ve created, is click the button to ask for the spreadsheet to be emailed to you. This happens automatically, if you enter your email address and the password.

You’ll be sent all your assumptions as part of this spreadsheet, which will make it easy for you to replicate your scenario in another session if you need to.

This is a tricky question.

The Calculator is kept up to date with the latest costs, tax rules, eligibility rules and government schemes.

The last update was on 24th March 2024 and included a change to Child Benefit thresholds (announced in the Spring Budget 2024) and changes to National Insurance (also announced in the Spring Budget).

However, the Calculator is a decision tool that’s intended to be directional and not accurate to the nearest decimal place.

We can’t be held liable for whether it’s correct for your location and your particular situation.

The point of this tool is not to predict costs with a pinpoint accuracy. It’s to use some assumptions to give you a ‘best guess’, and explain those assumptions, and to enable you to make decisions. And as such, please do not rely upon all the numbers in it without question.

If absolutely necessary, it will work on a mobile device, but it’s intended for use on desktop computers or laptops.

There are editable tables in the Calculator that extend out 10 years, and they won’t show all those years on a mobile device. So it’s really important to view them on a desktop or a laptop.

No.

The largest costs of having children for most households (unless you plan to use private education) are (1) lost income from working less, and (2) childcare costs.

Most families are unable to avoid either of these costs – unless you’re very lucky to have a free source of childcare on tap!

So that’s what the Calculator focuses on.

Other costs associated with having children tend to be VERY variable, and will depend on your spending habits and needs as a family. In addition, you may also reduce certain expenditure types when you become parents, to balance out additional costs.

Preparental will be building further tools to help plan for these other cost impacts too, but because they are so family-specific, they have been left out of this Calculator.

The Calculator works with the default assumption that inflation is zero. Obviously this is unrealistic, which is why – at the end of your scenario-building – you can play around with different inflation assumptions.

Leaving inflation out of the Calculator while you’re building your scenario is helpful because it makes it easier for you to see the impact of your decisions on the numbers, without the added complication of inflation.

However, it’s important to be able to see the effect of inflation on your plans. In fact, we recommend that you do this, because salary inflation over time can affect whether or not you pass eligibility thresholds for certain child-related benefits.

The Calculator assumes that your household finances are shared. It doesn’t separate out your finances between partners in the overall numbers.

We did think about creating an option to do this, but it simply begs too many questions about how to allocate new costs fairly, and whether one partner should compensate the other partner for taking time off work.

The Calculator will still help you if you’re keeping your finances separate. However, you will still need to work out how you’re going to split costs like childcare costs, and how you’re going to compensate a partner who’s doing more of the childcare.

Did you know?

All the Preparental tools, courses and resources are free to members of The Parenthood Planning Club.

Join The Club

READ ALL ABOUT IT

Featured Blog Posts

“Purposeful Parenthood Planning with Helen Cammack”
How To Plan | Podcast Episodes

“Purposeful Parenthood Planning with Helen Cammack”

Tamsin Williamson, The Parenthood Coach, interviewed Helen Cammack, the founder of Preparental, for her ‘Do Your Thing’ podcast (it’s episode 27), about how the act of purposefully planning her experience of parenthood ahead of time has had a profound impact on how she does her thing in her life and Motherhood. How to Listen You…

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