Maternity Leave Question

Short term disability does not pay much, depending on the policy, a much smaller percentage of normal income but better than nothing. You probably have to pay into for a while before using it. My wife had it through her job so I don’t know. You might have had an option for spouse during your re-enrollment.

There’s always onlyfans, wackos like pregnancy belly’s. Or she could try to be influencer and document her pregnancy on IG/TT

There are short term disability policies for self employed people but they are more expensive than those through employers. Plus STD usually only covers 6-8 weeks for a pregnancy/delivery so it may be more trouble than it's worth for a policy that would cover 60% of income.

Probably better off just setting aside savings in advance.

Wife was a contracted employee and we just saved up extra money on top of our emergency fund for baby. Turned out I also quit my job right before baby was born so we had ZERO actual income for 3 months from me and 4 months from her - except the extra savings we had set aside which worked out just fine.

My wife also does freelance graphic design through her own S-Corp so basically we didnt pay herself out of the business that year until the baby was born and that was her "income" if you will when baby was born, this was on top of us just setting aside extra money for a year or so in advance. All worked out, but took a lot of planning. We planned for worst case which worked out well considering we both werent working for a while and on top of that were paying $1700/mo in cobra so we could have insurance for the 3 of us