Income and giving up work

[Almondbiscotti]

The million pound question: how much would your household income be in order for one parent to pack work in to be a stay at home parent? OH and I have similar incomes (£10k difference) and are both higher tax band earners although his job has more potential for future salary increase. TIA.

Depends where you live, how much debt/mortgage you have, how many children you have, are they at private school..... Sorry - I know that's not very helpful, but it's a bit of a "how long is a piece of string?" sort of question.

Impossible question to answer really.

Totally depends on outgoings, lifestyle and what you are willing to sacrifice.

My husband earns a reasonably good salary (£35k) and many families live comfortably on less. But we have high mortgage payments and are both paying off other debts. We don't lead an extravagant lifestyle by any means (no holidays, very rare that we go out, shop at Aldi etc etc).

We literally could not pay all our absolutely necessary outgoings without me working too and I earn £17k part time.

Probably going to get flamed for this but the higher the salary of the second earner then in my opinion the harder it is to adjust to one salary.

Me and DH each come home with about £2'000 after tax, so a joint take home pay of £4'000. We both work full time in professional jobs.

As well as all the usual household outgoings we put a lot of money into savings every month, we overpay our mortgage every month, we put money in a holiday fund every month and money into DS's bank account every month.

Our childcare bill is usually about £400 a month so only 10% of our monthly income which is minimal compared to some.

Looking at the bigger picture I probably could give up work but it means that all saving we do (as written above) would have to stop and neither of us particularly want to do that as we like having our safety nets.

As a previous poster said, it's all about sacrifice and whether a family is willing to take such a big hit if one person stopping working has a big impact on the finances. Seeing as I earn 50% of our monthly income then that's a big drop if I stopped working.

Depends on your outgoings and what standard of living you want. Also what the lower earner earns. I'm a SAHM and we have a 19 month age gap between dc. I wasn't a high earner and childcare for 2 would have been my entire earnings so we would have been 'down' a wage either way. Dp is on £47k and it's enough to be comfortable but saving for a house is going to have to wait until I'm working again.