Financial Clarification

I received a comment that I want to post here just to clarify some things. Here is the abridged version on the comment:

"I use a mix of Luvs diapers and Pampers diapers for night time use. The cost of diapers for Luvs is around $17, not including coupon savings or specials at Kroger/Target (I got them for $14.50 this week at Kroger!). The count of diapers varies from over 200 diapers for newborn sizes down to 80 diapers for size 5. Pampers is typically $19, again not including coupons (which are in the Sunday paper once/month for $2 off) and specials ($16.50 at Kroger this week!). So let’s average at $17/ 100 diapers over the lifetime of the child, which is conservatively expensive. At 2920 diapers per year, it is $496.40. Assuming you use a Diaper Genie, the cost for refills and the Diaper Genie for those diapers is about $84 (the first year, subtract $40 cost for the Genie itself on subsequent years). Over 3 years you spend total $1737.

Let’s look at the cloth diapers. RealdiaperAssociation.org recommends 6 dozen diapers over the child’s lifetime. At a cost of ~$20 each, you will spend $1440. Of course you need to launder these diapers, which I calculated for my Kenmore High Efficiency models assuming doing a load every 3 days, you would spend ~ $168/yr. It would be more if you used a standard washer/dryer of course. The grand total: $1945. Uhhh, where’s my savings? You mean it costs me MORE to get cloth? AND I have to clean them?"

Thank you for these comments! I want to clarify a couple of things. First off, the recommendation to buy 6 dozen diapers over the child's lifetime most likely refers to flats and prefolds, which I will be discussing the cost of these in that post. They are nowhere near $20 each. I personally have about 30 diapers total, none flats or prefolds, and I never run out of diapers when I launder them every other day. I also did not spend $20 each on my diapers. Many of my diapers I bought used from www.diaperswappers.com, and many I bought new for way less than that. My brand new expensive ones (that I must admit I love!!) are $24.95. In total, I have spent about $500-$600 total on my diapers, and I will not be buying more unless I buy some potty training ones or occasionally try a new one here and there. And granted, since some of my diapers are used, the elastic may go out on them, so I might need to replace those. So, add on an extra 100 bucks just for the fun of it, and I have still saved around a $1000. But even if I had 30 of my expensive ones, the cost would still be $750. Still saving...