This guest post on motherhood is from Catherine Alford at Budget Blonde. After you read her post, head over to her website, where I’m guest posting today.

Having and raising children is expensive, and I should know because I got a two for one special with my adorable boy-girl twins. In fact, by some counts the cost of raising a child to adulthood can be around $245,000 not including college! That’s insane!

Even though I don’t feel that raising a child actually costs that much for most families, mine included, having children is still a big financial burden if you aren’t adequately prepared for motherhood.

Because I’m a planner by nature and like to have things as organized as possible before I make any big, life-altering decisions, I approached motherhood with that same attitude.

I asked everyone I knew how to get prepared financially for motherhood and now that I’ve been through it myself, here are my top 4 ways to do so:

Research, Research, Research

As I said before, I like to be organized and prepared for any big decision in life. When I first found out I was pregnant, I did a lot of research about how much money I needed to set aside before the arrival of our twins and motherhood.

I asked my mom, my mother-in-law, and my friends who were already mothers to weigh in on this important topic. What I heard from them varied quite a bit, but it gave a good basis to get started prepping financially for motherhood. All in all I decided to save $10,000 before the twins came, $5,000 for each.

Set Up a Targeted Savings Account

Once I had a number in mind, I set up a targeted savings account and started socking money away. I set up my “baby fund” with Smarty Pig, but there are other banking institutions that allow you to create several targeted savings funds too.

A targeted savings account is key to save up for motherhood because it keeps this money separate from your other savings, like your emergency fund, a vacation fund, or whatever other savings you have set up.

This really reduces the temptation to raid the fund to pay for something else besides baby purchases. After all, if your savings account says “baby” on it, you’re much less likely to take away from it. (If you have questions about Smarty Pig feel free to e-mail me, and I can send you an invite!)

Consider Life Insurance

If you haven’t already thought about life insurance before getting pregnant, now is the time to do it. It might a bit morbid to think like this, but it’s especially important to have life insurance for yourself and your child’s father in case something were to happen to either of you.

As mentioned earlier, raising a child is very expensive and it would be all the more difficult to do it alone if something were to happen to either of the baby’s parents. Life insurance can help ease that burden at least a little bit, so it’s worth checking into if you haven’t already.

Get a Will

Again, a little morbid I know, but having legal documentation in place is all the more important once you have a child. Having a basic will drawn up on your behalf is fairly inexpensive and will provide a lot of peace of mind in case you or your child ever has to deal with a death in the family. During that time of grieving, the last thing you want to deal with are complicated estate laws, so a will help simplify that process.

How did you prep financially for motherhood?

Catherine Alford is the go-to personal finance expert for educated, aspirational moms who want to recapture their life passions, earn more, reach their goals, and take on a more active financial role in their families. She is also founder of www.BudgetBlonde.com and the innovator behind the web’s most comprehensive course on how to Get Paid to Write for Blogs.

4 Ways to Prepare Financially for Motherhood is a post from: When Life Gives You Lemons. Did you like the post? Follow me on Twitter, like me on Facebook, or hop on over to my blog and leave me your feedback.

I’ve only mentioned it on Twitter and never on here, but my mom discovered my blog.

I thought I was being so sly, covering up my tracks and being little miss anonymous. But not so much. When I went home for Easter, we sat out on the back porch sipping wine and giggling over our pups when she told me she had to tell me something. I would have never guessed that the next words that came out of her mouth would be “I know about your blog”.

I burst into tears (yeah, dramatic) and asked her if she was mad. Yes, I asked her if she was mad at me. I thought she’d be upset with me for keeping my blog – my proverbial “baby” – a secret for almost a year and a half. She told me she wasn’t, and that she was proud of me, and we moved on.

I thought having somebody so close to me know about this little internet nook would be detrimental to it’s success. It hasn’t been. Nothing’s changed, really, except that every night I ask the universe to spare me from people I know finding out about the blog before I’m ready.

I digress. The real reason I’m writing this post is to share with you a few things that my mother taught me in life, in light of mothers day. She’ll read this, probably, and I hope she does. ‘Cause she’s my hero.

When I was young, my parents divorced. This left my mother with two young children, in a small town with limited financial resources. My mom commuted for three hours to get to her job every day, struggling to make ends meet with a mortgage, her kids (one of them being a growing boy who ate more than one can imagine), and not enough time on her hands.

She was super mom to the extreme. My mom was my team’s soccer coach, and a girl scout leader. She was our personal chauffer, bringing us to (at any given time, and usually all in the same week): figure skating, soccer (both of us, different teams), boy scouts (him), girl scouts (me), dance class (2 separate types, 2 separate nights – me), karate (him), swimming lessons (both of us, different classes), art lessons (him),  skiing and snowboarding (both), basketball (both of us, different times), track n’ field, and obviously play dates, school functions, craft fairs, bake sales, field trips, birthday parties, volunteer work, school plays, and the like.

All while working full-time. With a three hour commute.

This is the same woman who – with all of this, doing it by herself – managed to go to the gym almost every day and never missed a soccer game, a dance recital, or a karate tournament; always had a healthy dinner on the table for us and kept a clean, comfortable home.

She managed to raise two pretty awesome kids (if I do say so myself ) and taught me a lot of important life lessons.

• Work Hard

My mom obviously had a really good work ethic and passed that down to both my brother and me. She led by example, never complaining that she didn’t have enough time to do something that she valued. She always told us to work hard and go to school so we could have a good life when we were grown up.

• Be Independent

Life Lessons From My Mother is a post from: When Life Gives You Lemons. Did you like the post? Follow me on Twitter, like me on Facebook, or hop on over to my blog and leave me your feedback.