Maternal / Paternal Leave

Sandy and I have been doing a little research on Maternal/Paternal Leave of absence with our repective companies. It seems that neither of our companies provides paid parental leave on their own. While each complies with state law that gurantee's return to work and allows leave of 12 or 13 weeks, the leave is entirely unpaid from the company's prespective. As the employee, we do still get something, available through the State Disability Insurance (SDI) which we grudgly contribute to without choice every paycheck. Well, I guess it's not for nothing, as it will cover some portion of the loss of income during the pregnancy and paternal leave. However, the payout is only 55% of salary (up to a max of about $900 a week, so if you earn over 83K/yr, it's going to be less than 55%). Sandy becomes eligible for disability leave 4 weeks prior to expected date and will be able to stay on it for 6 weeks after delievery. Then she can go on "parental leave" which is used for bonding with the baby for another 6 weeks. This is also the part where I'm eligible to get paid too.

Anyways, overall, the research results were a bit disappointing as we've heard other friends and family whose employers either provide some amount of full pay leave (1~4 weeks) or provide pay on top of the SDI for an additional 20~45% so that there is less or no loss of income during the leave. But I guess it's nothing tragic, we'll just have to make do and plan ahead. In fact, there's a decent chance that I won't even be employeed at that time as I'm currently applying for business school so there's lots of other things to consider. We'll just have to ride things out and as we know more, make the most apprepriate decisions and live with it.