How to Survive Buying a Home When You’re Having a Baby

House hunting is not for the faint of heart (as anyone currently exploring the market has probably already figured out). But add in pregnancy exhaustion or a new baby and anything you can do to make it feel like less of a full-time job is a win. We’ve partnered with Opendoor to share our best tips for easing some of the stress that can come from buying and selling a house while … housing a human.

1. Is It Better to Move While Pregnant or With a Baby?

You can’t exactly plan when you’ll find the ideal home any better than you can plan when you’ll be expecting a baby. But if you’re considering whether to buy while pregnant or after the baby arrives, the consensus is pretty universal—at least among an informal poll of anyone we know who did it and the majority of Reddit—moving while pregnant is often much easier than moving with a baby.

So if you’re able to coordinate your move to take place before your due date, it may save you some logistical headaches. Bonus points if you can plan for those magical second trimester moments when you should hopefully feel a little bit like a human again. But if the timing doesn’t line up perfectly, there’s no need to panic. Plenty of people have moved with newborns and lived to tell the tale.

Some ways you can do that? Start by creating a moving calendar as soon as you can, accounting for your baby’s current sleep and feeding schedule. Next up: call in the reinforcements. Whether you tap family to babysit while you master moving day or hire professional movers to do the heavy lifting so you can be with baby, securing help early on makes managing a move and a newborn much easier.

2. Let Loved Ones Help You

Pregnancy can be a time when your friends and family are itching to shower you with support—whether that’s in the form of gifts or more tactical help (packing up boxes, anyone?). If you know you’re going to be house hunting around the same time as your baby shower, one way you can let them do that is with a cash fund, like Opendoor’s Home Fund. You can add it directly to your Babylist registry, making it easier for friends and family to offer financial support to help with your down payment. And since it’s integrated into your registry, you can skip the awkward conversations that can sometimes come up when asking for money.

Opendoor Baby's First Home Fund

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3. Tour Homes on Your Schedule

One of the more daunting aspects of house hunting is the sheer mental load associated with all those logistics (during a time when your brain’s energy reserves are already pretty maxed out). So if the thought of sending dozens of text chains to brokers to coordinate viewings makes you want to go take a nap, there is a more convenient way to house hunt. Cut down on some of the go-go-go of traditional house buying by opting to schedule private home tours with the Opendoor app—giving you the flexibility to set your own timeline (and keeping your text messages where they belong: discussing last week’s episode of Real Housewives).

4. Skip the Hassle of Selling with a Cash Offer

Before you can buy a new house, you might need to sell your old one, which usually means staging, showings and open houses. That’s a lot of work for someone already preparing for a baby and looking for a new home. Throw in the looming deadline of a due date and time is of the essence. If the goal is to sell quickly, you can skip the work of showings and staging and get a cash offer from Opendoor directly (according to those Redditors we mentioned above—it’s actually as low key as it sounds).

Bonus: if you buy and sell with Opendoor, you can forget the hassles of aligning close dates and instead have the flexibility to move on your own timeline. Just choose your close date, and they’ll handle the rest, making the process smoother and more convenient for you.

5. Don’t Expect to Do the Heavy Lifting

One of the most frustrating aspects of pregnancy and new parenthood is that nagging feeling like you could (or should) be able to just … do more. But now is not the time to be overestimating your abilities (aka you probably can’t or at least shouldn’t try to pack up a three-bedroom house by yourself at 40 weeks pregnant). But that’s easier said than done when you’re calculating the costs of hiring movers on top of down payments and closing costs and everything else that goes into buying a new home.

So here’s a self-preservation tip: consider your time and energy as line items in your budget along with your cash. When you have to factor the cost of your mental or physical well-being into your calculations, it makes it a little easier to prioritize how you want to get things done. For example, it may mean hiring movers if your budget allows. Or if you’re trying to preserve both your finances and your wellness, it could simply mean coming to terms with the idea that it could take the better part of your baby’s toddlerhood before all your boxes are unpacked.

Oh, and if loved ones offer to help you move? Take them up on it. There are always so many more boxes than you think there are going to be and the payoff of not having to pack them yourself is probably worth listening to your father-in-law question why anyone needs so many throw pillows.

Already on the hunt for a new home? Check out Opendoor for even more ways to simplify the home buying and selling process.

This article is sponsored by Opendoor. Babylist’s free site, apps and emails are made possible by our sponsors. We limit our sponsored content to relevant partners that offer products and services we believe in and use ourselves.