How do families have SAHMs?

[LikeDaisies]

Financially - I cannot comprehend how it’s possible!

Husband is a teacher. Earns around £44,000. That isn’t enough to cover our bills if I were to leave my job and stay at home with our baby.

Mortgage is £900. Other bills come to around £700 - not considering food, leisure, etc.

Not that I’d want to leave my job, but I’d love to be able to drop down to 3 days a week. But financially it just isn’t possible. We wouldn’t be able to afford our mortgage and bills.

So it leaves me wondering how I see so many families who are able to manage having a SAHM.

Please can anyone who is in this situation explain how it is possible/how you make it work?

It seems to me that SAHM are either very affluent (married to wealthy men) or poor (single mothers or low earners who couldn’t afford childcare). The majority of women working full time with 3 kids and have always done so like me are somewhere in the middle. In saying that, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I look forward to retiring at 55 years on a defined benefit scheme with full service. It’s hard. Working when your kids are little (which we’d all love) or working at 65. Choose your hard. Also, I want my daughter to go to university, as I did, for a career, not to give up work when she has children a few years later… and same for my sons’ wives.

There are a number of studies. This is quite a good starting point.

https://cls.ucl.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Mothers-and-the-modern-family-.pdf

And this study found particular benefits for the daughters of working mothers.

https://www.hbs.edu/news/articles/Pages/mcginn-working-mom.aspx

The husband obviously has an extremely well paid job ,or there is family money.
But I agree. Most families need 2 working parents. Look at statistics.

I’m a sahm to 3 children aged 5 and under,

My husband works in finance/ sales. We (rightly) don’t qualify for any childcare funding so it would cost more than I would earn and a chunk of my husbands salary to have 2 in nursery and wraparound for our reception aged child.

he earns £120 base with commission, total usually £180. It does not feel like a lot of money at all. South London. We holiday at eurocamp and I buy yellow label food! I buy all the kids clothes on Vinted and sell them again.

aka we are not rolling in it. We won’t be doing private school, don’t do tons of after school clubs. Live in a semi detached new build house.

As other posters have said, teaching is badly paid. My husband is a teacher too, similar pay to yours and I have always had to work. Never had the luxury of being a SAHM, which I would have loved, especially whtn they were younger. I am a teacher too but my salary is nowhere near as good as his as I have been part time since we married, or worked in FE which pays even more badly, and also my subject means if I worked full time I would be working about 80 hours a week! Friends of mine the same village are SAHMs even though the children have left home because their husbands are bankers or lawyers. To put it into perspective when I do sessional work at the college where I work I don't get much more per hour than I used to pay my clearner when I was full time. That's how much we value teachers in this country.

Your huband earns three times what my husband earns as a teacher. He is dealing with really badly behaved children all day and his health is starting to suffer. I really wish we had not going into teaching as it pays so badly.

Hello! I am a stay at home parent to my 15 month old. I had an £150k job and saved for years (not scrimped) I enjoyed my money and lifestyle. I also bought 2 London properties when still a bit young.(27 and 32) My husband earns twice more. We have no mortgage on our joint property (south london) I am living off my mat pay - didn’t use any of it whilst on mat leave and I got full pay for 6 months and my rental income

See, here on mumsnet there is such a massive divide in people's circumstances. A vanishing amount of people have a £150k job with a husband who earns 300k. And even fewer own multiple London properties. The vast majority are struggling at the moment. I don't know that it's all that helpful to post and say you have loads of money and you are in the enviable position of being very comfortably off. I'm pleased, obviously, that not everybody is having a hard time of it, but I think it needs to be pointed out that your position is quite unusual.
I have friends who are really, really very well off so to speak. And their ignorance of the limits of our finances are palpable when they suggest a meal out and we demur. To them it's a pub meal that comes to no more than £150. To us that is a lot of money we could have saved. We are pensioners, and not rich ones.
Our income is not going to increase anytime soon. Every £100 we overspend each month comes out of the limited capital we have left.

Not all boomer pensioners are rich.

I’m a SAHM and our outgoings are 44k a year and that’s living very comfortably with plenty of disposable income.

it depends on how high your outgoings are.

we don’t have a mortgage or childcare costs.

if we had a mortgage and childcare etc then I would probably have to go to work

I am flabbergasted. Where on earth is 180K going? There's nothing wrong with buying yellow sticker food or clothes from Vinted, but you imply that you need to buy cheap because times are tough.

I earn a fuck tonne less than that (academia) and am a lone parent. Today I bought my son new clothes and we had dinner out. Nothing fancy, but we are not going without.

Do you have a lot of debt? Are you saving a great deal?

Do you mean your income is 44K? If your outgoings are 44K and you still have plenty of disposable income you whole income must be more than 44K.

If her husband is PAYE then he will pay an enormous amount of tax on that.

No our outgoings including the disposable income is 44k

I am a SAHD, my wife earns a ton of money in a bank. When I was working we had a series of nannies, but now I’m the nanny.
My wife is a workaholic, so I do feel like a single parent, but I’m grateful for her support.
ok have gone off topic.
good luck

For sure, but you'd think you'd still be able to buy your children new clothes and non-sticker food (and I reiterate, there is nothing wrong with that, but she implied she needed to).

Until you have actually been a single parent you really don't know how that feels.

Yes, but they should still be able to afford new clothes.

OK. It was a strange way to word it, but I understand.
Indeed with no mortgage or childcare costs then living off the salary OP talks about is quite straightforward.

Sorry I realise I did word it in a weird way 😬

I worked PT, 3 days a week for 11 years. Our total income the last year we did this ( 2 years ago) was about £80K in London. We managed well to start with but eventually it got too tight. Luckily this coincided with feeling ready to go back FT so now manage much more easily. I think we could just about manage with one of us doing a 4 day week but it would involve sacrificing something.

My partner is a teacher earning 53k and we are doing ok. I was a SAHM for 3 years then worked for 3 months once they started nursery but soon after starting my job I got diagnosed with Graves’ disease and left due to the stress (very toxic place). It helps that we are in a HA house so rent is only 650 a month. But we are a family of 5 (6 when my daughter is home from uni). I wouldn’t say we are well off but we are comfortable, can afford to keep saving to buy a house and we are well fed, clothed and want for nothing. It’s doable if you can be good with money.

That's useful thank you for sharing - there really is no one right way for everyone is there

They live in London….so it’s probably going on rent/mortgage.

When we had kids my husband made 7 times what I did, my wage wouldn’t cover the childcare costs for me to work full time even wirh 15 hours funded when they turn 3.

Sorry pressed go too soon - I am the first woman in as many generations as my great gran can remember to not have a job as a mother, but am the first to have zero help from family on either side. It is what it is and I recognise even without a ‘village’ I’m extremely fortunate in many ways.

I was a sahm because everything and more of what I earnt would have gone on childcare and travel to work.