Anyone found that working full time when you have primary aged child isn’t that financially viable

[Kittencuddle]

So been sahp for years
do voluntary work and have a busy and full life
dh in high salary so no benefits etc

anyway a job has come up with the organisation that I volunteer for
it not well paid 25-27k per year
but I think it would be really enjoyable

ds in year 4
well half way through year 4

so he would need to go to before school club and after school club
I think this is over 20 quid a day
maybe around 25ish ?

id need a second car and it’s a 50 min drive each way
so no idea how much petrol is use a month ?
it’s Mon to Fri 9 -5
so even getting back to collect from after school at 6 could be right if there’s any road accidents etc
plus in holidays
I guess I’d have to use holiday clubs or child minder

so I’m just wondering how financially feasible this is

dh sometimes works from home but it’s not reliable so I’d have to have a child care plan in place

@SimplySeb I think that at 8 or 9 years of he will be fine. Presumably he’s already in school for around 6 hours a day

Don't engage with this person as it will just turn into a woman with children shouldn't work thread... It's exhausting.

My advice as someone who was a sahp for a few years is first off to ignore all the moralising messages about how you should be working as if we're all economic units rather than people.

Then, do you want to go back to work? If the answer is yes at any point, grab the opportunity with both hands because you are qualified and have experience to do it, and I can tell you that coming back to work after sah is not easy so don't pass it up.

Lastly I would say y4 is a good time to think about doing it because as Ds gets older you are going to need to be out of the house sometimes tbh. He will start travelling independently in the next few years and the school gate will become less of a centre socially etc. I reckon you'll need wrap around care for 2 years max.

Basically go for it if you want to go back to work at all. If you don't and you don't have to, then don't! Nobody outside your family gets to decide.

I earn just over 30k per year. Lone parent. 900 on rent 900 on childcare. Get some universal credit. It is financially viable for me to work.

£150 a day 5 days a week is £36K a year you are paying to a childcare provider. You can vet and hire a full-time live out nanny for that kind of money, and you have a personal connection with someone you trust.

So if one parent doesn't work then you have zero income but also zero childcare costs.

To facilitate them going back to work you need to pay childcare. Fine.

But if that cost of childcare goes over the income generated, that just leaves an additional expense you didn't have as a family.

If it still does generate income, but that income is only a couple hundred quid a month, is it worth it? For some people it will be for all the other reasons why we work. For others it will be doing a lot for very little.

If it’s a full year job rather than term time I’d prob let the job go. Who wants to work full time and miss out on a child’s formative years anyway?
Just go with your gut. You’ll be working till your nearly seventy anyway so why not take the time out with your child if you are quite comfortable.

Yes fair enough. I just cannot stand the number of women in 2023 who think childcare is their burden and the presumption that their job must be so inconsequential that's its never worth it. Unless you have zero career prospects, it's always worth it to work.

My husband also has a job and pays for childcare for his children too. However your £36k is wrong because we get tax-free childcare from the government so it only costs us 80% of the full amount so we pay £28,880. I'm not hugely agreeing or disagreeing with your perspective BTW. Please do read my second post about how this isn't just about the money, it's about how it falls into the bigger picture for OP's goals and life plan. If her goal is to be a SAHM for as long as she humanly can, and her husband is okay with that, then great. If she wants a career, however, now's as good a time as any.

And yes, I did run the numbers on getting a nanny as a possibility, but I like the nursery they're already settled in with their friends and anyway nannies in my area are £15 an hour (so no price difference) and I'd have to faff with registering with HMRC for tax, interviewing people etc whereas the outstanding nursery already does all that for me.

So you take home a shade over £2K and you have added benefits on top of that.
But you sepnd £1800 of it on rent and childcare costs.
You've still got travel, evergy bills, food bills, single housegold council tax, clothing, things to do with the kids at the weekend, mobile phone, internet access, TV license if you have one, etc.
All on £200 a month plus benefits.
That's pretty grim.
Respect for making that work.

Why is the childcare planning all your responsibility?

He can drop off and pick up. Especially since he’s got a car.

I simply do not believe that he’s actually got a job where he cannot possibly commit to drop offs or pick ups. I know plenty of men in all sorts of Very Important Jobs who manage to pick their own children up from school club.

If you don’t want to work, then just admit that. Don’t start building up a case against it on the basis that you’re a lone parent who must do and pay for everything herself, and offsetting literally everything possible (vehicle taxes) against your salary so that you can argue that it’s just impossible.

Loads of people in all sorts of jobs work FT with children. Many simply have to. There’s no other choice.

She doesn't have a man to pay for her existence, like you.

As a widowed single parent, I didn’t have the option of relying on DH’s salary. I had to work to support my two DC, and I just had to suck up the childcare costs and live frugally for three years until they started school.
We didn’t have a holiday for those years, the DC wore second hand clothes, and I couldn’t save a penny from my income. But one has to do whatever is required to keep food on the table. You can always make your budget balance somehow.
Once they were in school, I only had to pay for school holiday cover. The village school had none so the DC commuted with me each day to an out of school club at a different primary in the city where I worked.
It is worth it even when you have a DH, OP, as it maintains your NI and pension contributions, and stops your work skills getting rusty.

Yep, nanny tax is a pain in the ass.
Its good if you can get it to work and you're happy, but working and breaking even for the sake of filling other peoples' pockets with money seems pointless to me.

@hryllilegur I've got a friend who's a surgeon. She can be pretty fixed with her start times for drop off, she cannot reliably commit to pick up though. Her partner has to do those. She can't just walk out the operating theatre at 4:30 because she had to collect the kids....

Incidentally she had the same issue with nursery always trying to call her if there was an issue.

Some jobs are a bit less 9-5 regular.

For me I’ll breathe a sign of relief when they get to primary school - try working when they are in nursery 😳…childcare for primary school is cheap!

Entitled much? Everyone pays fuel, cars, childcare and most people I know earn around that amount.

You and your husband should share childcare costs.

Exactly!

Yes this annoys me too.

How many miles is the commute OP? I wouldn't expect it to be more than 100 round trip, £15 of petrol per day? Plus £20 of childcare, on say £80 take home. So from a first look calculation, you would still be taking home over half of it, with holiday childcare as a further cost on top of that.

Just running the numbers.
There's a point at around the £27K combined household income mark where you are better of living on benefits than working. That is the problem in our society. I dont know whether it should be more, to encourage more people to live on benefits, or less to encourage more people to work. But clearly when life is grim fro anyone who works full time something is broken.

Its actually a disgrace when people are questioning the posters willingness to work. She’s already said she does volunteer work and that’s how she came across the job.
Some really nasty people on here trying to moralise when this is a big decision with trade offs.
Lets face it, kids get fed up being palmed off to breakfast and after school clubs with cheap rubbish snacks and would rather be in their own home with their mum or primary caregiver.
I think it’s a disgrace women are forced out to work before the child is in secondary school anyway. I was really happier with a mum who was there after school and I could play with my friends in the street rather than being in some stuffy room till 6pm.

That's a completely pointless statement.

The view that it's not worth the Mother working because all of the childcare would come out of/not cover 'her' salary drives me slightly nuts.

You're contributing £27K to the household pot. The total of that household pot is then reduced by the cost of travel/childcare etc. Does that pot still have enough in it once those costs come out? That's your answer.

Would love to be on 25k a year 🙄

Are you a troll? Or a bot from the 1950s? Women forced out to work? Children aren't the sum total of our existence you know?