Ever since we found out Chuck was being laid off, I've been thinking about maternity leave. With our first two children I took the maximum amount of leave I could, 12 weeks, both times. These 12 weeks are available to me because my company is big enough to qualify for the Family Medical Leave Act. Not all of that 12 weeks was paid though of course.
At my workplace, you get six weeks of paid leave for a vaginal delivery and eight weeks of paid leave for a cesarean delivery. I've been fortunate to avoid c-sections the first two times and I anticipate that will happen again, unless the baby is breech or some other complication arises. If I want to take the full 12 weeks then only 6 of those weeks would be paid. Before Chuck was laid off we would have tried to stretch his income, use a little from the emergency fund and gone the whole six weeks unpaid. Now that's not an option.
However, I do have three weeks of vacation that I can use this year. Chuck and I have talked and we don't want to use all three weeks during maternity leave and then leave me (us) with nothing for the rest of the year. So I think I'm going to use two weeks of vacation time during maternity leave.
That means I'll either be going 4 weeks unpaid (6 weeks paid plus 2 weeks vacation) or 2 weeks unpaid (8 weeks paid plus 2 weeks vacation). Either way, our emergency fund will help fill the gap and for that I am very grateful. This is our last baby and I want to be able to stay home and enjoy him and my older two children as long as I can.
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Are you able to use sick leave before you start your 6 weeks paid? Also, check on disability insurance. I paid about $30/month through my work, and it gave me a $1500 check that helped out during the unpaid portion of my FMLA leave!
Hi Jessica - at my workplace I don't have sick leave. If I'm sick, I stay home and still get paid. If it goes on for more than 5 days then I'm supposed to get a doctor's note, etc. but for anything else they don't worry about it. So, I don't have any sick leave I can use. It's either paid leave or vacation time.
I'll look at disability insurance though!
At my work, female employees are eligible for 6 weeks of paid maternity leave (at 60% of base pay) through short-term disability, plus an additional 6 weeks of unpaid leave (FMLA runs concurrently, so it's still only 12 weeks total).
Both short-term and long-term disability are optional (I think I pay like $13/mo for the short-term disability), but they had a maternity exclusion where you had to have the short-term for at least twelve months before you could make a claim against it.
Congratulations, by the way! We are expecting our second so babies are on the brain in our house as well. My wife was working for our first and got 2 months leave. It was not paid at all except for 2 weeks. I think Jessica's mention of disability insurance is not a bad idea. We never considered it but the suggestion may lead us to this time around!
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