to think childcare costs for 3 primary school aged children are too expensive to make working worthwhile?

[pingu2209]

Now that my last child has started school I decided to look to get back into paid employment. To pay for 3 children to go to breakfast club and then after school club, during term time, the fees will amount to £1350 a month. During school holidays the fees will amount to £1690 a month. On the basis my husband and I will try to take our holiday over a chunk of any school holiday, any salary I earn needs to cover the £1350 childcare costs PLUS any costs for parking and fuel for commuting.

On that basis I need to earn £25k/yr to break even.

I have applied and applied for jobs and can not get anything near the amount I need to warrent me working.

Due to my husband's salary we won't get any support for childcare costs.

I am so pissed off. I really want to work. I am worried that I will have bugger all pension and to be frank, we could really do with more money because everything is going up in price.

As I have a degree, a masters, a professional dimloma and 13 years work experience in marketing that is my preferred option. However, as I haven't done any paid work for 5 1/2 years nobody is interested.

Am I unreasonable to think that it is actually not financially viable for a mother to work if she has 3+ children?

Is there any way that you could get a job where times fitted a bit better? So you could either use the before school breakfast club or the aftrer school one, but not both? Or work between you and DH that one of you goes in late and the other comes home early, at least on one or two days a week.

natation You are totally correct. It was a shock to me that DH and I would be better off financially if we divorced and lived in two separate residences. It did influence our decision not to return to the UK as I wanted to continue working and l rather like my DH. The benefit of me working 50 hrs a week as a married couple would be GBP5k at most. Not worth it at all. With two children we would be worse off with me working. When politicans talk of equality they miss this huge elephant in the room. The tax system is set up to penalize women.

Here in the US the tax system is not perfect but they do have one things right and that is taxing household income, doubling limits if both parents are working and they have a child tax credit if your household income is below a certain threshold (I know as a married couple it applies to a household where income is less than $90k/yr but don't know the limits for other categories).