Lucy and James are expecting their first child in six months. They had one question. Here's how they answered it.
We found out in March.
We'd been hoping, planning, talking about it for a while — and then suddenly it was real, and the next six months had a shape to them that nothing else in our lives ever quite has.
The first thing James said, after everything else, was: "We should go somewhere. Just us. Before everything changes."
Which is exactly the right thing to say. And also the kind of thing that immediately raises a practical question neither of us said out loud for about a week: can we actually afford it?
The situation
We're both 32. We both work. We own our flat — mortgage, two incomes, one salary on maternity pay from month seven. We've been sensible. We have savings. We have pensions we've been contributing to since our late twenties because someone told us to and we're glad we listened.
But "sensible" and "can we afford a proper holiday in the next six months without it causing problems later" aren't automatically the same thing.
Lucy's maternity pay drops in month four. We'd worked that out. What we hadn't worked out — properly, with actual numbers — was whether the holiday money would still be there while everything else was also happening at once.
What we did
James set up giltedge one evening while Lucy was reading. Put in both salaries. The mortgage. Our regular expenses. The savings we'd built up. The pensions. Lucy's maternity pay schedule, month by month, as the income stream it actually is.
Then he went to the When Can I card and typed in the cost of the holiday we actually wanted. Not a vague number. The real one — flights, hotel, ten days, the version worth having before everything changes.
The card came back with a date.
Four months from now. Cash available. Savings intact. Mortgage unaffected. Maternity period covered.
"We can do it," he said.
He showed Lucy the screen. She looked at it for a moment.
"Book it," she said.
What we know now
We booked it the next morning. Croatia. Two weeks, not one, because the numbers said we could.
We're not reckless. We checked. We used real figures, ran the real scenario, confirmed it was real — and then we said yes to something we'll remember for the rest of our lives.
giltedge didn't tell us to go. It just told us we could.
