When pregnant with our first, we mulled over the cloth vs disposable diapers option and decided to pull the trigger on cloth diapers (Chase was skeptical but came around pretty quick). You can get a more expensive cloth diapers for $20-$30 per diaper or you can get cheaper cloth diapers for $4-$5 per diaper. Since we didn’t know if we would actually “do” cloth diapering and we were just trying it out, we went the frugal way and man oh man was it amazing. The 25 diapers we bought for Big M are the same ones we used for Little M (that’s five years of the same diapers being used). $125 for five years of diapers….yes please! We were not a hard never use disposables ever type of cloth diaperer….we used them on occasion and used “normal” diapers at night. We bought roughly a pack of 30 disposable diapers a month during that time.
Per Google it costs $750 a year to diaper a child which is $3,750 for five years. Our pack of Aldi diapers was $10 a month, for easy math let’s say we spent $150 a year on disposable diapers which is $750 for five years. If you add the $750 we spent on disposable plus the $125 we spent on cloth that’s a total of $875 spent on five years with of diapers vs $3,750. For a little extra work, we saved almost $3,000 compared to the Google average plus that’s way less that are now resting in landfills!
We would make the same decision again in a heartbeat, but the other side of the story is you have to clean those bad boys. When you live in a house with a washer and dryer you simply put the poo in the toilet and the diaper in a laundry basket (with a lid). When said basket is full you put them in the washer (for two back to back cycles) and then put them out to dry in the sun or in the dryer depending on weather. Very easy very simple, its purely just another load of laundry. But when you don’t live in a house with a washer and dryer and you live in a camper… you go back in time to a bucket and plunger. Since August our cloth diapers have been cleaned via plunging and rinsing and plunging and rinsing. A lot more work but again its way cheaper and we do have time on our hands. In more exciting news…. we believe we are DONE WITH DIAPERS! When the first poo is at a gas station, when we had over a six hour drive with no accidents pulling over only two times to go to the bathroom we are feeling pretty good about the whole potty training thing! You know you are a travel family when he’s struggling a bit to master the poo-ing aspect of things and you ask him where he wants to do said #2 and he says “gas station” bahaha!
(Anyone who has questions about cloth diapering I’d be happy to chat. It did seem daunting at first but we figured it out and you can too!)
I also used cloth diapers, but splurged on a diaper service. I had 3 kids in 4.5 years and was working…no time to do all the things. It was great ! I lived the newly washed diapers that were delivered everyweek. It still was way cheaper than disposable diapers. For my first child, I was permitted to take home the disposable diapers that people had left behind in the bassinet. I stockpiled tons before she was born !! Ca -ching !!
Whoa that’s awesome, I can’t even imagine how many diapers you would have had at once! So neat all the different ways we can do this life!