I earn around 40k, so does my husband. This is a take home of about £2,500 each. I’ve only just gone back full time so I haven’t earnt this for a while.
I want to leave my job to become self employed. It would be difficult to soft launch whilst still working as I would need permission from my employer. I can’t just do it anyway because if they found out I could surprise loose my job and I could be disciplined by my professional regulator for being dishonest.
Before Christmas I worked 4 days but my work only agreed to that because it was temporary. I really want to be able to spend more time with my 1 and 4 year old especially because the eldest starts school in September and I’ll never get this time back. I never really got over going back to work after maternity leave, my heads not really in my work. I had 9 months off because I only had SMP but it was too soon. Settling baby in nursery was a bit of a shit show. They are settled now and doing well in nursery.
The thing is we haven’t really recovered financially from my maternity leave yet. We got through about 5k of savings which we’ve been trying to build back up but with nursery fees for 2 kids and needing to do some renovations on the house when I first started earning again saving money has been very slow. We have finished the immediate jobs that needed doing on the house.
Our mortgage is £1,100, we spend around another £1,000 on bills, insurance and food combined and then another £1,800 on childcare (that’s with free hours and tax free childcare). We put away £100 a month for car maintenance and whatever’s left pays for anything else, holidays etc.
The most sensible thing would be wait until my eldest is in school and really save some money from the reduced nursery fees before taking the plunge. Then put the youngest in a term time only nursery when they’re 2 and that would be much cheaper.
But I don’t want to do that. I want to leave my job after Easter. Put the children down to 1 or 2 days in the nursery and spend the summer term playing with them and working for myself for around 20 hours a week. Hopefully I could cover the nursery fees with my income. We just won’t have much of a financial cushion for if things go pear shaped or I don’t get any clients.
AIBU to walk away from my 40k job? Or do I just need to put my grown up pants on and suck it up and accept that adults can’t just quit. I just really miss spending time with my kids.