Sacrificing one income to stay at home with your children can be as affordable as working (and, in my opinion, much more satisfying). Those first few years before they enter school play a vital role in their development. As a parent, being at home with them, particularly in those early years can be not only emotionally-rewarding, but financially sound.
If you want to stay at home with your children and are unsure that you can make it work within a budget, this post is for you.
I’ve been at home with my kids since the day my oldest was born over 16 years ago. Our family has swelled to seven (five kids) since then and I have not earned a single dime in that time.
In our case, the phrase “a penny saved is a penny earned” plays the greatest role in making having a stay-at-home parent affordable. Besides saving thousands of dollars in child care costs, justifying a stay-at-home parent for financial reasons can be accomplished in many ways.
Here are my top tips for saving money as a stay-at-home parent.
1. Don’t pay someone else to do something you can do yourself.
I have taught nine years of preschool to my children. (Amount saved: $1000/year)
Each and every haircut my husband gets is at my hands. My kids get one professional cut per year (if they’re lucky).
Amount saved: $500/year, give or take.
I have taught approximately four years of piano to each of my kids. Had I enlisted an outside teacher, it would have cost $250/month on the low end for my four daughters and $500/month on the high end.
Amount saved: $3-6000/year.
My husband and I perform most minor fixes/maintenance on our home and landscaping.
I never knew how much home repairs/updates cost when you pay someone else to do them until we did a major remodel on our home last year. We thought maybe we’d just wrap up the final touches ourselves but after 7 months of living in chaos, we were ready to be done. So we hired out the painting. It was several thousand dollars. We could have done it for under $500 (the cost of materials).
Having done many repairs over the years, we’ve saved thousands of dollars.
Consider your skills, your time, and your budget and figure out which tasks you can perform that others might pay someone else to do. If you lack confidence, YouTube is always your friend.
2. Don’t feel like you have to fork out cash to look put-together for a bunch of littles.
The global beauty industry is worth almost $600 billion. That’s just cosmetics. To make us look prettier. Think about that for a second.
I know moms who claim that they are better moms when they put on their “face”. I think that’s fine for them but I’m just not buying it.
My kids don’t care how I look and neither should I. I figure I can learn to love myself without spending my kids’ college funds on my appearance. Harsh? Yeah maybe. I’m not opposed to makeup, just overspending on makeup.
As for clothes, since there’s no set dress code when you work from home, feel free to dress the part. A few great outfits never hurt anyone, but you can do it on the cheap. Same goes for the kids. Graciously accept hand-me-downs, shop at thrift stores, and wait to buy until end-of-season clearance rolls around to keep costs low.
3. Save on food by making most everything at home. Better yet, from scratch.
Talk to anyone who’s ever pulled themselves out of debt in a hurry. The first thing they cut: eating out. Because it’s totally unnecessary. And it costs an arm and a leg.
Cooking from scratch just makes sense for stay-at-home parents. It’s cheaper, it’s healthier, and it is delicious. We eat out pretty much only for birthdays and on vacation and I estimate it saves us $500/month for our family of seven. At least.
If you’re feeling really ambitious, baking your own bread, rolls, and making your own snacks (or refraining from buying them in the first place) will ease your grocery bill, as well.
Take, for example, this glorious garlic naan I made with my own two hands. Know how much this would cost at the grocery store? I don’t. Because I’ve never bought it. Besides, does the store-bought naan look this good?
Yeah, that’s what I thought.
Loving leftovers makes a difference too.
4. Cars are depreciating assets. Don’t waste money buying the fastest and most furious.
A car is simply a mechanism to get from point A to point B. Yes, a reliable car is a must. A fancy one is not.
My husband and I pay cash for used cars, repair them as needed, and run them into the ground. We capitalize on all those people who buy new cars that depreciate the moment they drive off the lot.
Think of it this way. If you buy a brand-new, fully-loaded Chevy Suburban, you’ll pay about $60,000, easy. We bought ours (9 years old) for about $7500 six years ago. We’ve put about $5000-7000 into it since then (new tires, mechanical fixes, oil changes, etc.). Which means we’ve spent about $2500 per year to drive it.
We’d have to drive the hypothetical brand-new Suburban at least 24 years (or more, because of inevitable maintenance and repairs) to match the under $2500/year cost. Plus, at $60,000, there’s a good chance we’d have to finance it. Add in interest, and it looks like we’ve saved ourselves a healthy chunk of cash.
On a larger scale: don’t finance anything but your house. Seriously. Paying interest is like burning money. Avoid it at all costs.
5. Travel on a budget.
My husband eats lunch occasionally with a co-worker who was a DINK (Dual Income No Kids) for at least 15 years before diving in and having kids. He and his wife were both engineers so, while not over-the-top wealthy, this gave them time to save a pretty great nest egg before throwing it all away on their children. 😉
I don’t recommend this course, for a number of reasons, but it does seem to ensure financial stability if one actually saves his/her earnings before starting a family. But that’s beside the point.
What I really want to say is, this co-worker relayed in conversation a recent vacation their family took. It cost them five figures. For their family of four. I don’t know that it was overly extravagant, but it indicates just how much travel can bust your budget without even trying.
I could write a whole post about how to save money on travel. My top three money-savers are this: Don’t fly, drive instead. Stay with family/friends or camp. Limit eating out. Like, a lot.
My kids know that lunch on road trips pretty much means mom whipping up sandwiches and passing them back from the passenger seat. They don’t even complain about the monotony anymore. It’s just what we do. And it saves us a ton of cash. PB&J for the win.
Though we’ve not yet left the continental U.S., our family has enjoyed at least one trip each year. We set a budget and we stick to it.
Our most recent trip cost us under $1500 for 10 days. The most expensive portion of the trip was the one day we spent at Universal Studios. But we could afford it because there were days where we spent next to nothing. It’s all about balance. Well, that and sharing a single butterbeer because buying one for each of us at 8 bucks a pop is a rip-off.
It’s difficult to quantify the exact amount we’ve saved over the years. But I rest assured that my efforts to save have yielded close to what I may have earned in the time I’ve stayed home to raise my kids.
Maybe. Maybe not.
Either way, staying at home with my kids was never about money. Sacrificing one income requires discipline, but is well worth it. And anyone can do it. Just remember: a penny saved is a penny earned.
I’ll add for food that growing your own can save quite a bit too. This year we got 10 pounds of cherries off of two trees. Last year $1.80 on cucumber seeds yielded 36 jars of pickles, which provided food for us as well as Christmas gifts for my aunts.
Some home improvement IS worth paying for such as if you need to rent a bunch of equipment to get the job done.(we just had our driveway extended and they did in half a day what would have taken us weeks to complete). Generally labor is double to triple the cost of materials. So it is worth scoping out and getting multiple estimates and references.
I agree entirely to always buy a used car. I have saved even more because my husband has changed out our brakes, wheel bearings, and even the suspension in my car. But even if you aren’t a mechanic, you can save about a hundred a year (per car) by doing your own oil changes. My dad would not let me leave for college without knowing how to do this (and change a flat). It’s messy but not hard.
I miss growing our own food. We skipped the garden this year and last due to the remodel (and subsequent landscaping re-do). And, some crops are more cost-effective than others. We use city water, which is much more expensive than the irrigation water that some Boiseans enjoy. Anything that can be canned is definitely worth it. As well as most herbs, in my book. And berries. We sure love our raspberries.
We have two rain barrels which helps, although it has been dry and hot the last month, so they are almost tapped.
I also learned to not buy soil to fill my raised beds. It seemed crazy to spend money on dirt, but usually my composter did not yield enough. I then learned about our town’s compost pile and filled our garbage can several times.