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?

I don't know how it's financially possible for a teacher with 3 kids under 3 to work full time unless they've got free family childcare or a partner who's a high earner. When I paid for 3 days of nursery (my mum had DC one day and DH one day) 12 years ago, it was £15k a year which wiped out most of my earnings. 2 x fees would have made it negative, never mind 3.

Hang around here a bit more and watch the language - it is exceptionally rare that men are mentioned at all in the SAHP discussions.

Why do you assume that DH and I didn’t do any of that? We spent 15 years building our careers and establishing ourselves to be in very senior but very flexible roles by the time DD came along and could work around each other. She was always with one or both of us as a toddler, we both did school runs, sports days, parents evenings, school plays. We were on the PTA and organised school discos etc. She had birthday parties (?).

Equal relationship from the off. Equal opportunity to build our careers. Equal parenting from the off. Not easy by any means, but our DD’s emotional and physical needs have always come first without either of us having to sacrifice our careers. And she benefits from having parents who work hard, not just a dad that does.

My dh takes home a minimum of 4100 per month (generally always 4300-4500 with overtime) though.

I take home a minimum of 3100 per month and usually I take home 3300ish. We also get 280 in child(which is saved for the dc for uni etc)

We budget off of our base pay and the extra overtime goes into our personal accounts to save as personal savings.

Now we have no childcare costs as mine are school age etc

If I had stayed at home we would lose 3300 pcm…that is our savings, holidays and 100 shaved off eating out, days out etc. I couldn’t live without being able to do those things. We would probably try to save and shave off money on other things too but as I said before, I don’t get treatments, I shop at Lidl, I’m also not a big spender on clothes etc.

I stayed home until my youngest was 2.5 and that was enough for me.

Im a SHAM, we had 3 small children when i gave up work to focus on the kids. I worked up until the birth of our 3rd, but then paying for 3 lots of nursery fees wasn't manageable (ironically i worked in the nursery they attended as a nursery nurse) i didn't have set days and they came to work with me when i was on shift. I worked the entire month to bring home maybe £80 after nursery fees (help wasnt really a thing this long ago)
My husband was/ is an engineer, works bloody hard and is always on call with work to provide for us one one wage, no benefits. We decided it was better me at home with the kids then spending more than I would earn.
All in school now, im still a SAHM incase im needed. But its a lifestyle that for us works, we need to budget and do take a holiday every other year.

On your husband’s take home pay, you aren’t entitled to full child benefit (over £70k).

It tapers between £60k and £80k which needs repaying via self assessment.

@Statsquestion2

Haven’t read far into these but they look interesting on the SAHP = SAHM point.

https://pureadmin.qub.ac.uk/ws/files/12745153/ciccia_socpol_libre.pdf

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/28/men-children-cultural-parenthood-hormones

I never said I was in the uk…lots of us on here are not.

Fair enough. There were no clues to this in your post though.

Why does there have to be clues?…the sahm/working mum debate is not confined to the uk.

It’s a fairly reasonable assumption given it’s a UK based site……

So you never once were at work at the same time?
And your work while never at the same time when babies, also in later years never occurs around school pick ups and drop offs, clubs and bedtimes every single day in school terms and holidays.
When would you ever see your spouse!

Being a UK-based site doesn’t mean every discussion is UK-specific. This particular debate exists well beyond the UK, so I don’t think assuming a UK context is necessary here. I was stating our financials i didn’t ask about advice on my cb payments.
Anyway…sorry for the detail 😂

This thread isn't a SAH/work debate, it's specifically about how households afford to have a SAH parent. When people are giving their incomes and outgoings it's useful to know which country they are in otherwise advice is at best irrelevant and at worst misleading.

I'm always curious who's shafted for sleep. Someone is awake the hours the kids are to provide full tiek childcare then has to go our to work

You shop at Lidl but you're not in the UK? Are you in Germany then? So many things are different there, from employment taxes to school hours to child support. It's quite possible a family could have a SAHM in another European country who couldn't in the UK.

There are two types of families that can afford to have a SAHM of the people I know.

They either have a high earner in the family or they rent instead of having a mortgage. The renters get a UC top up that essentially covers the second wage.

Most of us sit somewhere in the middle and work part time.

We can’t have been, given we used no paid childcare and had no family within hundreds of miles.

We both worked extremely flexibly. DH’s clients are global, so he could be working on projects in different time zones from home with variable meeting times. I could work 3 overnights a week and usually only had 1 day of meetings per week which DH could cover. We compressed work into 4 days each which meant we had a lot more flexibility when we were both at home. We planned work travel in advance and caught up on sleep when DD napped. Once she was in school it got a bit easier for both of us to get most of our work in during school hours and we worked around each other for the rest.

In the 70s my mum worked evenings/nights from when I was a couple of months old. My dad would come in and she would go out and then we all had weekends together. My life has never been on a 9-5 schedule!

We’re all owls. DH needs less sleep than me. DD never had a 7-7 routine, even when she started school. We’re probably much more European in our approach to what happens at what time (we eat late, go to bed late, sleep late when possible etc). Lots of ND in the family so probably a bit different to most.

Teachers are well payed but the work load is a lot. They aren't poor.

Our childcare was €1400 a month. Two women came into our home (one did two days, the other did three days). No family help whatsoever.

Lidl is everywhere…I’m in Ireland

I’m not misleading anyone though…I stated our income. Ireland is not vastly different to the uk.

No, it's not, but you did generate confusion when you said you didn't pay water bills or council tax. You could easily have stated you were in Ireland which would have avoided that confusion.

The country is relevant in financial discussions though. Childcare in the UK is extremely expensive. Help with childcare is assessed on the higher earners income, so you can have professional women unable to afford to work as tge Family would have to pay out more than their wage. The long term benefit is irrelevant if they can't afford the mortgage bill at the time.

With no financial help,childcare can cost over £25k a year for one child.

We managed by cutting right back on spending. Aldi shopping, no takeaways, we didnt drink or smoke, took caravan holidays. No beauty treatments with the exception of hair. Went to council gym. We didnt really have a choice. I had been made redundant and was freelancing when i got pregnant (was told this would never happen). Childcare costs were already pretty high with 2 adopted toddlers but with 3 I would be working for next to nothing. This was years ago though and when I look back, they were chaotic, busy and the happiest years.