Do any single mums manage to work part-time? If yes, please tell me how!

[Twoddle]

Unless they're, say, a GP or lawyer or similar. Having previously been a SAHM, I need to get back into the workplace ASAP. I can expect to earn the national average salary at a push. I'm wondering how any other lone parents, earning a fairly average salary and even with a decent financial settlement, manage to work part-time - or don't they?

While I can see that plans to home ed DS will no doubt have to go out the window (for now at least), I had at the very least hoped to be able to collect him from school and have his friends over for a play and some tea. Is this simply not a luxury most lone parents can afford?

(Sorry to be a bit glum: January, combined with these worries, combined with tiredness, do not a happy mummy make!)

I work part time. I do 3 full days (9-5) and 2 shorter days (10-2) so that I'm doing 30 hours (which gets a bonus from tax credits) but I get to do the school run 2 days a week.

The school ds1 goes to has breakfast/after school club which really helps and ds2 goes to a nursery on the full days and a childminder on the short days.

Thanks for posting, CallMe.

Do you get to make it to school plays and sports days and the like? Do you miss your kids, working 30 hours/week including three full days?

Questions, questions ...

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It's his first year in school so I haven't done sports day yet!

I've managed to go to lots so far, I either take my hols (helps that I get 25 ex bank hols) or arrange to make up the hours another day, so I perhaps do a full day instead of a short one and take the hours off another day.

I think it really helps to have a flexible employer.

Oh, and no, I don't miss them anymore than is healthy. I enjoy the break!

Twoddle, there's a knack to working this. It all depends on the number of hours you do. Part-time can mean anything. I actually work full time, but when I was investigating going part-time I found that working 16 hours left me a lot better off financially than working 24 hours a week. This is because at 16 hours I qualified for Housing Benefit, Council Tax Benefit, extra Tax Credits, SureStart (correct name?) benefits, school meals, etc. At 24 hours, I wasn't entitled to any of those, and the extra day's wages was nowhere near enough to cover the loss of those benefits.

If you log on to www.entitledto.com you can try out different working scenarios. Work out what your salary would be for various situations (e.g. 16 hours, 24 hours, 32 hours per week) and then go through each of these on the website. I'm sure you'll find out what situation will suit you best.

Best of luck!

I'd agree with Optimist, you will probably find that doing either 16 or 30 will work out better financially than any other amount. You have to do 16 to get the tax credits and the bonus kicks in at 30, so anything in between is sort of unrewarded, if that makes sense

Legal secretaries seem to earn more than the national average and to be able to work part-time, but I think you might either have to go to college for that first or agree to do some professional education while you are working. This site seems to have some useful info. www.legalsecretary.co.uk/legal_secretary.asp

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it might not be better, depends what you earn I guess and whether you still get housing etc doing your 21 hours. If you don't, you might if you drop hours. Or you might find the extra you get for doing 30 hours is more than it costs you to work it (childcare/petrol etc)

Hi.

I'm single, work and home ed. I wrote big long post about it in the home ed forum if you want to read it. I'll go hunt it out and bump it up for you.

The help I get from tax credits is an essential. But it is possible depending on what you do and how you organise things, its one of the things that is really important to me and that I'm willing to compromise other things to continue doing.

Anna

Really helpful replies, ladies. I'm new to all this, so thanks for pointing me in the direction of how to make it work.

I miss DS already, and he's at school mornings only. Full days (for him) will jerk a tear - full days for me I can't really contemplate! So if I can make 16 hours/week work, that would be great.

Aimsmum, I'm amazed at how you manage "totally fine"! Either my budget's too indulgent, or you are economising queen.

I suppose I hadn't really thought about benefits and tax credits. I guess they could help a lot. Do most lone parents tend to receive state help to a greater or lesser extent?

Anna, yes, please do link me to your thread. HE is important to me too, but I couldn't do it without support - and with enough money to go places with DS: train trips, drive to education centres and HE activities, etc. There isn't much going on HE-wise within 10-20 miles of here, so having enough money to run a car would probably be essential. I'd love to read more about how you manage it. Am feeling inspired.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk?topicid=home_ed&threadid=642115-Did-any-of-you-choose-HE-having-withdraw n-from-not#13112960

Right; its a bit out of date.

Since that mega long reply DD's dad has become more useless - he has to work now but I still don't see a penny.

So, my answer has been to hire a nanny as a share with another family. I pay her for 20 hours. The plan is that ex gives me dates for the month at the beginning of it. I plan the nanny's hours around them to allow me to make all my out of the home committments.

The time I 'work' with my DD is getting longer - although still very informal on her part; she plays in word or with paint on the computer and not much else. But it means that each morning I get time to check in on my emails and see if there is anything urgent to do while DD also gets used to having some communal working alone time

The nanny has only been here officially for a week and I'm already making more money!

We do live in a city, just recently there have been more opportunities to do HE things. So that might be more difficult if you are further from other HE families. But the HE camps are very cheap holidays and lovely for meeting people. There's a single parent Yahoo group linked to in the thread if you don't already know about it? There are lots of people who would have advice about doing it on an low income and suggestions about how you can make it work.

Tax credits IMO are the only way Lone Parents can afford to work.

oh; the nanny is OFSTEAD registered so I can claim back a good chunk of her wages in child tax credits. For a single parent with one child they give up to 80% of £170 per week, depending on your actual income. The tax credit calculator on the HMRC website will show you how much you could claim (for any registered childcare; and you can still use a childminder if you HE, there is a list floating round of HE friendly childminders)

OFSTED, not ofstead. oops

Thanks, anastaisia. While you were posting, I found your post on Litchick's recent thread too, about working and HE. I posted on there too.

I'm pretty switched on (I think ... ), but am not qualified as such to do anything better paid than average, so paying a nanny would not be an option. It's great that it works for you, though.

I'm sorry that your daughter's dad isn't more dependable. You sound like you're grabbing the bull by the horns, though, and making your situation into a positive one which aligns as much as possible with your values. Good for you! I'm at the resisting/wallowing stage - not so productive nor constructive!

Sleep will help. Night.

Thanks for that info, CallMe. Useful to know this kind of thing - hasn't been relevant until now, and not knowing it meant the road ahead looked tougher than it perhaps might be.

I am currently on maternity leave with ds who is my second dc and I am facing the same dilemma. WIth dd I worked full time and it was incredibly stressful- I spent all my time rushing around and she spent all day in nursery from 8.15 til 5.30. Now she is just starting school and with ds added to the mix it's just not going to be possible for me to go back to working the same hours. WHen I was, tax credits were my saviour, as they allowed me to pay for nursery and ensure that I had money in my account each week. I think there are a lot of hidden costs of working though- I spent upwards of about £50 on travel a month, an automatic late fee of £15 if i was ever late to pick dd up and the cost of work clthes which can be expensive if like me you end up working in a very posh office. I loved my work but the balance just wasn't right. For me it's a hard prospect going back to work anI think that for at least another year I'm going to have to manage staying at home - I missed an awful lot of time with dd and looking back I can see that it just wasn't necessary and that it was quite hard on her he adored nursery but it's hard when you literally see your child to give them breakfast and put them to bed. You also have to factor in things like illness- I took all of my holiday days on an emergency basis- I would literally have to ring in if dd was ill and take it off my holiday days, which meant that I never really got a proper break in the year. Nursery holidays were another headache, especially as we have NO family nearby- it is literlly just me, so if something goes wrong I'm the one who has to deal with it. PArt time is probably the perfect solution, and I know lots of places do offer term time only work which would be ideal. So yes, to cap off a mammoth post, I do think it is worth it but it can be bloody difficult at times.

When I first knew for sure I was going to be doing the bulk of the parenting on my own I felt like that. I mean, I was already doing the bulk of it - but KNOWING it was different. It did take me a while to get to the point where I had plans instead of a vague idea of what I wanted my life to be like. I've had 3 years or more by now.

I hope things look brighter after a decent sleep!

Thanks, littlelamb. It can't be easy juggling this situation with a baby as well as your DD.

Your experience of working full-time sounds very stressful. The being utterly-knackered-and-dashing-about-and-hardly-seeing-DS dimension scares me enough to make living in a tent in my parents' garden appealing! - if it'd make life a bit simpler and give us more time together.

Are there really lots of jobs about offering school term-only hours? I'm guessing they're all school-based ones?

I've just been on www.entitledto.com - thanks for that link, OptimistS - and would be entitled to a decent chunk of tax credit, earning what I'd expect to for about 16 hours' work a week. That's more like it.

Thanks for opening my eyes to what's possible, ladies.

Really am going to bed now ...

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I do 32.5 hours a week to fit around one school run a week and before/after school care on the other days. Sports day, school concerts etc get fitted in by taking day or half day's holiday. Have cut down hours since ds started school as it worked out cheaper to do that and make use of school wraparound care than continuing to use my childminder.

I worked full time from when I went back to work after having DS and recently went part time.

I work 17.5 hours and read the posts re working 16 or 30 hours with interest.... I was doing some extra hours in my old job for a while so this will be the first month on my actual part time salary so I am a bit scared.....

The reason I stopped working full time was that I felt I was just running my self into the ground - I had a bad experience at work and my EX is VERY trying (to say the least) so I thought that a couple of years part time might help me cope. I am sure that I will find it a bit tight financially but that is the decision I made. I enjoy having more time with DS and I feel much more on top of things - yes boring things like housework and life admin - when I was full time I feel like I spent most of the weekend trying to do that and then was just as knackered by Sunday night as I had been on Friday!

Ex is pretty unreliable with money and childcare and basically does nothing but irritate me by being a total first rate tosser.

I get some tax credits but at the moment as I was full time for most of this tax year they haven't gone up yet so I am hoping they will in APril.

It definitely IS managable, good lcuk!