What would you give up to stay home?
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| Sat, 08-05-2006 - 8:36am |
Hi everyone.
I have always said that staying home is so important to me that I would give up many things to be able to do that. We live in a very small home, I have no jewelry and we buy all our clothes at Walmart. I know that if I went back to work, we could afford more. But I would never trade being at home for a larger house or more luxuries.
However, after reading this board I have started to suspect that there are things I would not want to give up. If I couldn't send my kids to preschool a couple of hours a day, if I couldn't afford any after school activities like ballet lessons or if I could'nt afford any kind of summer program for them, I think I would have to find a way to go back to work. So basically, I'm perfectly happy to deny myself "things." But I would not want to take much away from the kids.
Of course I would probably have to find a new career becuase I could never work the 80 hours a week my old career entailed.

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See and I sometimes wonder if my moms friend had, lets say a receptionist job, would things have turned out differently? Even though the income would not have been great, would she have had more confidence that she could make ends meet and left? On the other hand maybe she is just the type of person who is dealing with many self esteem issues (from her past?) and would have stayed regardless of her work status. That is also totally likely. I guess we will never know.
Sometimes the acorn leaps far away from the tree in a very deliberate attempt to grow in a completely different section of the forest. Sometimes the acorn falls near the tree but there's an earthquake and the acorn finds itself in a completely different forest with completely different growth conditions. IOW, some kids follow in their parents' footesteps for better or worse, some are extremely reactive and choose a life path as pointedly different from one or both parents as they possibly can and some kids choose a life path that is completely different because their adult circumstances are so different from their parents' that they can't use their parents' lives as a default blueprint.
Furthermore, the aphorism "the acorn doesn't fall far from the tree" is not referring to life paths so much as it's referring to attitudes. (And even then it's only true sometimes- as all aphorisms are only true sometimes).
When I was a kid I knew what salary range my parents were in. They never told me, but kids have this way of finding out stuff ("little pitchers have big ears", or some saying like that,LOL).
Most SAHMs are poor planners? Where you you get off saying that? You seem to know a lot about other people's finanes. Personally I feel that bringing up afew "real life" cases to support a viewpoint adds little to the debate. I know 3 WOHM personally who have very little money, work long hours and would do just about anything to SAH. Do I think they represent all or even MOST WOHM? Nah...
Can you provide a link to the "savings rates" that show it's only the families with a SAHP doing poorly? Do you think a family with a SAHP simply spends more than a DWOH family? Because the data I've seen only has DWOP outearning A WOHP/SAHP by about 10%. How do you reconcile that with your theory of SAH = not financially secure.
Color me confused but I thought that a good household income was a good household income, whther it comes from 1 parent or 2....
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