Do you think your family saves money with a SAHP?

Parenting
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For those who don’t know me on here - My husband (“the Boy”) and I have been doing equally shared parenting since our daughter (“the cuckoo” was born 3 years ago. We also have 2 newly teenage boys from my first marriage, who live with us in the school year. We’ve both been working part-time, totalling 50 hours per week, and have not used any paid childcare. (I work every other Saturday, he works some nights.) PT work is common in my field (libraries) and he was able to negotiate it with his employer (he’s a drafter for a civil engineering firm).

I am being considering for a big promotion that would rquire me to work FT. It’s something I’ve wanted for years and even pursued before we had the cuckoo. I’m getting restless with PT work and not being able to take leadership roles, being out of the loop, etc.

If I get this promotion, the Boy is interested in quitting his job altogether. Plan B would be to negotiate a very limited schedule that he could work on my weekday off and during the cuckoo’s preschool time, but he’s not sure his company would go for it. He was raised by a SAHM and places a high value on having a parent available in the home every day.

But I expect our income would be noticeably lower, and my new salary would not cover our current spending and savings. Which brings me to my question - for people that have a SAHP, how much did going in that direction affect your family finances?

We don’t have any huge smoking guns like paying for a housecleaner or frequently getting takeout.

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The biggest areas I save money now are the 2 you said you don’t have - house cleaner and takeout/restaurants. We’ve dramatically cut back on takeout and no longer have the cleaner. We marginally save money on clothes now that I don’t need work clothes, and no work lunches or coffee for me. Our grocery bill hasn’t changed much, and most of our other expenses have been pretty dialed in for years. I do have less of a desire to travel now that I’m less stressed, but we still do travel plenty.

Probably the other biggest thing is that since our income nearly halved, our taxes went down a lot! You could check out the IRS tax estimator to see how your income changes would affect your withholdings.

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Our income would be substantially lower without one of us working – we’re like 55/45 on income share brought in. I looked into whether we could afford Wizard, who’s the lower earner, being a SAHP, and it wouldn’t work for us because we own a home in a VHCOLA. If it were just my salary and no daycare costs, we could just make ends meet, but we wouldn’t be able to save at all, which to my mind makes it not a viable option. (And there’s definitely no way we’d be making ends meet on Wizard’s salary.)

I think SAHP tends to make more sense financially when one spouse earns substantially less than the other, and especially for a spouse working minimum wage at e.g. retail where the income is less than the cost of daycare, hours are highly variable, and bennies suck.

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I was a SAHM out of choice. I had two children, one considered special needs. I had to pay double the going rate for child care for her. I was earning minimum wage and was PT at the time. Child care alone put me in the hole every month. Let alone any of the other costs related to working. I quit and actually saw our quality of life increase. We lived in a pretty high COLA at that time.

I recommend looking at an old book called “Your Money or Your Life” by Dominguez and Robin. It really helped me sort through the numbers. That’s how I calculated how much work was really costing me. I stayed for the annual bonus, which paid off a loan from family for a washer and dryer.

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In a word, no. But in a few more words, my experience is a little different becasue my household went (within about 18 months) from DINK to me being a SAHM.

This is where we are. My husband’s salary is enough to live on, but we’re not saving hardly anything besides retirement (for him). I think it depends on how much you want to be saving/how important that is for you. The only way we could save money would be to cut any and all “want” spending down to basically nothing, which we haven’t figured out how to do.

The only “savings” we incurred when I stopped working was no longer paying for daycare. In our case everything else remained about the same. We still spend the same on food, mortgage, etc. I’m hoping to reenter the workforce eventually because I don’t want this forever.

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The only thing that threw me for a loop was I actually want a cleaning service MORE because small children are dirtying the house 24/7 and I don’t have time for deep cleaning tasks!! But if kids are all in school/preschool that’s possibly becomes less of a concern. Fingers crossed for my future :laughing:

But our main savings is from not having childcare costs for multiple small kids. Other than that I don’t think we save a ton of extra money. It’s mostly intangible lifestyle improvements we really enjoy by having someone at home. We feel ok about this financially because spouses career trajectory/income potential steadily and predictably increases year after year.

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I quit a high-paying job about 7 years ago to be a SAHM, partially because of extremely high childcare costs, but mostly because I was having stress-related health problems and I hated my job. We saved a lot on childcare and my commute, a medium amount on not having to hire a house cleaner or get takeout and a small amount on cost of work clothes. In the grocery category I cook primarily from scratch and we buy very little prepared or convenience foods (mostly because I like to cook). I also buy as much children’s gear used as I can and sell it when we’re done with it. There were pretty big tax benefits for us with one high-earner and one zero-earner. I think the reduction in familial stress probably helped us save in shopping categories, but that’s harder to quantify.

Being a SAHM was harder on my mental health than I could have predicted and I’m very glad that both my kids are in elementary school now. If I could have worked part time when they were 3+ years old and sent them to half-day daycare I would have jumped at that chance. It sounds like your budget already excludes the heavy hitters of childcare and takeout so it might be tight for you.

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Yes! And it also hits us on cooking sometimes! And exercise! Sometimes everything is nice, but more often a section of a room is clean for 17 seconds. Like my downstairs was great yesterday now it is very not.

It is the right choice for us because B1 and my health would trash my ability to work and we’d be paying for childcare (and before/after school) on a lot of days when I couldn’t pull in money. Plus we do have that giant income gap- if I went FT I’d probably be 45-60k in 5 years but starting at 0.

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To answer your original question, no we don’t save more. Our house is a lot less stressed, though.

I’m able to take point on all house projects that require hiring out (getting multiple quotes, following up, etc.) and I can take a first pass at repairs like when a toilet needed all the tank parts replaced. Me and YouTube and the hardware store was cheaper then calling a plumber. But when I was working full time I way out earned any “savings” from DIY stuff around the house.

I do have time to shop at Aldi’s in addition to our regular grocery store but I can’t get everything we need at Aldi’s so I end up making two trips. I could get more of Kiddo’s clothes second hand but I don’t. Not a ton of savings there either. And because I left my job when Kiddo was in elementary school we didn’t even save on daycare.

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Hi it me :joy: my earnings when I quit were about $33k/yr. When I quit Husband’s were like $125k (including his bonus)? And last year he made like $300k. There’s a literal order of magnitude between our earnings there. But to get his level of earnings, his schedule is INSANE and he sometimes has “leave the state on 4 hours notice” type work, and very often has “be somewhere in the middle of nowhere for a week” type work. That coupled with no family nearby and me working 12s with basically no benefits? Def makes sense for me to stay at home.

I think this is a big factor. One kid, ehhh math. But once you’re talking care for 2, 3, etc young kids it starts to shift the math pretty hard when you factor in childcare.

This. Agreed. We didn’t spend much on takeout anyway, and wouldn’t now, so no big savings there. But life flows much more smoothly, I don’t have to stress when someone is sick, I don’t live on the edge of my daycare provider closing (recently happened to a friend without warning and omg the stress). Life is a slower more zen pace because I’m home. (But I would also be in a high stress field- nursing- if I was working, so it’s very pronounced in our case).

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The school holidays :sob: good god. Care coordination for in service and all that is bonkers.

ETA oh another smooth thing- I can get services like speech therapy for Latte during off peak hours versus fighting for the very limited evening and weekend slots. Open up flexibility there.

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For some neighbors I know, I honestly think they spend nearly as much being a SAHP as if they were both working. If SAH is super hard on your mental health and you respond by doing soft play most days ($25 per kid), plus driving all over ($gas), plus grabbing fast food when you’re out, plus enrolling in tons of activities ($$$)? Ends up spendy. The one neighbor I’m thinking of it was literally- 2 kids. Nearly daily soft play. Swim ($130 per kid per month), soccer ($80 per kid per month), music class ($90 per kid per 6 week session) and I think one other I’m forgetting.

Plus frequent retail therapy because she wanted to escape home all the time. Oh and did the “buy them a toy on every single errand stop to bribe happiness”. I cannot IMAGINE how much they were spending. (They moved a few months ago to another town).

Not meaning to drag the neighbor- she was a sweet lady, just miserable- just pointing out there are cheaper and spendier ways it can be done.

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No kids here. I however, did have a business that ate almost all my time and a lot of our money. The yardstick that got me to finally give up and close the store was DH tallying up our obligated expenses, rent for the shop, car payments (if any), mortgage, utilities in both locations, etc. After he did the math, he looked at me and said we are obligated to spend about 1.5x my salary, monthly.

So, if I had a bad month, we were in the hole. Forget savings. Forget not living on credit… And, after 9 years, emotionally I’d had it too. I closed the store.

Interestingly enough, one of the biggest complaints I got about this was from DH who thought we’d go broke without the cashflow from the business (great when it was good, not consistent). I kept telling him we’d cut our expenses way down, but it took him a few months to actually see it. We were in the hole for the utilities and credit cards… it took a while for us to get to the point where we paid our bills and had something left over again.

In my defense, the bookstore was supposed to augment our retirement, not eat it. Amazon happened. The internet happened – the used book business completely crashed, unlike what it had done for decades. I never thought I could support us, but I thought I could do the time-honored notion of selling the end of my stock off our porch or mail order, to the tune of $100+ a month – grocery money at the time. Or, I would sell the business and get a chunk o’ cash.

It just became a black hole down which we poured $ instead.

So, yes, I did due diligence, I had solid plans, tracking, etc. I did not get into so much debt with bank loans by buying a building, etc. that I declared bankruptcy at the end (had a colleague who did exacty that). But it was not fun.

My recommendation would be do due diligence. Keep doing it. Figure out when you’ll pull the plug, what your tipping points are. I wish I’d done that. I spent 10 years working for others to learn how the business worked before I opened my own shop. I had an established customer base. I had a lot of things that meant it should have worked, until it didnt’.

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Not a SAHP, but grew up with one: just to state the obvious, the parent who is home is still the same person they were before. I grew up with a stay at home dad (but don’t call him that) who, say, is a good cook from scratch who doesn’t want to eat out that often, but isn’t handy and would always hire out home repairs. So a lot will depend on the specific parent and what they make time to prioritize.

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I don’t think I could pass up having this as an opportunity either. If I could continue professional part time work with affordable preschool? Heck yea! I feel that way even with really enjoying being a SAHP.

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I have to work really hard on this. My mental health hinges pretty hard on being out of the house at least once a day, and it’s hard to do that without a money-spending destination. So on a good day we will do library, park, etc.

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Like with all things parenting, there is truly no winning! If you didn’t take you kid places, people would say you aren’t socializing them, they aren’t being enriched, etc etc. I do think my specific kid benefits a lot from going places during the week even though we have to pay for some of it.

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It saved us money but honestly, nobody was going to pay me enough money to pay for daycare, as I specialized in work that fell into the “socially responsible but minimum wage” category.

We spent $0 on childcare over the umm, 15 years that we had a preschool aged kid. We also spent $0 on takeout food, housecleaning, and vacations.

I’m pretty domestic and I like being at home, so I enjoyed it. I read a lot, I made stuff, we went to playgroups and the park and the library. I coached my kids’ teams.

It was a lot of work.

But also, my dh had a job that was in no way flexible and had very long hours. He worked more like 60 hours/week. It didn’t pay all that well when the kids were little, either.

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I so wish this were more common. Both Wizard and I would love doing PT work with PT daycare/juggling between the two of us – it’s just not viable in our fields.

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The consensus definitely seems to be “no,” there are no hidden savings I haven’t thought of.

And also that the system we have now is really enviable. It’s amazing! We both have jobs! We both stay home with our baby! No daycare! I’m just starting to get a little bored/stifled/FOMO with the limitations of PT work. Our jobs are pretty equivalent in terms of pay and benefits, but I am more passionate about mine.

I don’t have the kind of breadwinner job people are talking about! If I get it, I would still make less than $90K and would probably never want another promotion.

I love this book! There’s an updated version with a foreword by Mr Money Mustache.

If I don’t get the job, we will keep doing what we’re doing with a fresh appreciation for our income level. I would still be interested in this kind of promotion in the future, but in the meantime we just chug along. Cuckoo goes to full-day pre-K in 2026, at which time we can both ramp up our hours as needed/available during the school year.

If I do get it, we will sit down with our expenses and talk about how low we could realistically get them. The Boy is thinking that he might approach his boss with an either/or - staying on for about 10 hours a week, mostly to manage their project management software, OR taking a one-year leave of absence and coming back at 20 hours/week when the cuckoo goes to full day school.

Honestly, I’m comfortable with this mostly being his decision. Like, if he thinks he can get our spending low enough without a lot of suffering, great. If he decides that it would be easier to keep working than to try to cut that much, also great.

I had a similar thread at MMM that got a little into SAHP vs paycheck parents. It’s funny, I think I see working less as less of a parenting choice and more a vaguely anti capitalist choice? Like FUCK YOU CAPITALISM I am too busy drinking a White Claw and dipping my feet in my preschooler’s wading pool to be either shopping or working.

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