I was actually surprised to see a dearth of male commentators on this post ….

My wife and I had our daughter last year (very similar time lines to the author). We both knew that my wife would go back to work after her maternity leave. She loves our daughter like no one else does, but being a stay at home mom wasn’t for her. I can’t imagine me being in the house all day, every day, with my baby, so I don’t see why my wife would want to do that either. She went back to work 10 weeks after our daughter’s birth. We were lucky that my parents were able to spend the next few weeks with us, so that our daughter didn’t have to go to day care till she was over 4 months old.

To me, the financial equation of a stay at home parent boils down to this: If the monthly cost of day care is more than the take home pay, of either of the parents, day care should be out of the question. The “take home” aspect guarantees that you’re contributing to your retirement plans and then have some left over. For us in Minnesota, day care is expensive – it costs us the equivalent of a second mortgage every month! Having said that, our day care is cost is less than half of either of our take home pay.

I have enjoyed reading many of these posts. Your’e stories are fascinating andI have learned so much from the experiences. Thank you!

Anything else is just a justification to drive an expensive SUV, which is fine, but it shouldn’t be considered a good financial move.

This idealized mom of yore who had a perfect home and a freshly baked pie in the oven when the husband came home is a figment of our collective imagination. If she did exist on occasion, then she was most likely miserable on the inside, because she had little to no time to relax. Or that husband (in a bygone age when wages and buying power were higher) was able to make enough to hire outside help. Perhaps, instead of blaming moms for being lazy computer users, we should blame the Steves of the world for not making enough money to afford the housekeeper and the babysitter. How would that make them feel?

Plus way back when moms were allowed to let kids roam the neighbor or play outside by themselves. These days if I let my 4 and 2 year old out in the backyard for long periods while I baked that proverbial apple pie, I would probably get reported to some governmental authority.

Thank god my husband is not a Steve, or at least if he does think that way, he keeps it to himself

Another set of calculations I did. $800 a month for daycare. $515.83 monthly payment for a minivan. Old car couldn’t seat all three kids. $500 a month into her 529 plan. It was a greater than 2K a month cost for the baby. And, that didn’t include diapers. We had all the toys, clothes, baby stuff already. I adore her, but that calculation made me realize that number four wasn’t in our finances.

Hoping that’s a typo.

Lynn – nice article about the pros and cons.

When I found out, I started the 9 month countdown to leaving. My husband was completely supportive of this, though has yet to get a raise since she was born, still drives 30 miles each way to work, but we are thrilled I can stay home with her. I love being able to update him on everything she does, instead of wondering what she did for 10 hours.

I figure we save on time- dropoff/pickup at daycare and I do all the errands during the week. To my husband, that’s worth a LOT because he hates shopping. We save on formula & food for her – I’ve been able to nurse for a year (and planning to continue for a while since she’s intolerant to milk), and homemade baby food is really simple and not as time consuming as I expected. I’ve made new friends by meeting other moms in the area through playgroups too. They were priceless the first few months since being a new parent is very overwhelming.

She’s almost a year, so is old enough to sit with me while I do chores, and watches intently while I make dinner. I act like I’m doing a cooking show, which keeps her wonderfully entertained for 20, 30, 40 minutes at a time. My husband takes the leftovers for lunch. The first 3 months she had colic, so I didn’t get a darn thing done other than showering some of the time. It’s a lot of fun now, though still always a challenge. She has never napped more than about 90 minutes a day, split between 2-3 separate naps. I got better breaks at my paying job!

There was never any discussion of me going back to work. And we just discovered the bonus of filing jointly for taxes with only one working spouse… much higher limits for each tax bracket & we have a ways to go before we hit the next % bracket. It is no longer a ‘marriage penalty’ with one working spouse! Last year we owed a ton, this year we got enough back to pay our insurances.

The hardest part is healthcare. The ‘affordable’ care act is not making anything more affordable, and I’m starting to fully believe it was a big scam to the American people for more control of our lives. For the last 10 years I held a private policy that only went up a few percent each year. Last year it went up 30%, so I swiched providers. My new provider is hiking the rate 50%!! Not awesome. My husband’s insurance is unafforable for a family. I’d like to consider another baby, but it’s literally not possible with our current income, unless we use our emergency funds (though that sort of defeats the purpose of it…).

In any case, thank you for sharing your story! I haven’t gotten a new outfit in over a year, I get most everything from freecycle or craigslist, I eat PBJs every single day, I’m driving a 10 year old car with a broken windshield, and I’ve only had 1 haircut the last 18 months. It’s worth every second.

There’s also Skype. You pay a fee for calling a landline, but it’s much lower than regular long distance. What Skype does, I believe, is it patches you through the internet to a landline that’s local to the number you’re calling. The catch, though, is having a reliable enough internet connection.

I’m actually considering leaving my job or scaling back, so this is something I’ve been weighing for a long time.

I think that a lot of the cost/savings analysis is really very personal. It’s easy to say oh, you’ll save on lunches and commuting time, but it’s not always true for everyone. My work place has a refrigerator and a microwave, and I take lunch most days. So no, I’m not going to save money on lunches. My office lets your wear corduroys or black jeans and a sweater, so I don’t have a separate work wardrobe that I need to maintain. Also, my office is actually closer than the grocery store or drug store, so if I left the house to run an errand I’d be using more gas that if I commuted to work. My inlaws provide daycare for me, so I don’t save on daycare.

On the positive side I have access to an FSA, 401K (and Roth 401K) with company match. I have cheaper health insurance than my DH’s last employer.

I actually spend 20 minutes doing a basic calculation and figured that of my $50K salary – if I stayed home we’d save about $16K and so we’d end up “losing” $34K.

so my point is that it’s very highly personal how much money you “save” and depends a lot on your personal situation.

On top of that, before I quit to take care of my parents, I had been working at a startup for five years that had no 401K plan or pension plan of any sort, and I totally failed to save for retirement during those years. So I am essentially more than a decade behind in retirement savings.

Day care around here costs between $1250 and $1500/month, depending on whether we choose at home care or a center. I’ve considered running a daycare myself for a couple of years, which would partially make up for my take-home income, but neither my husband nor I can stand the idea of the kind of stress that would cause to both of us and our home. But most importantly, I now have a job with a defined pension plan, and so it would mean more years of not paying into the plan. So I just don’t see how we could do it.

Knowing all I know now, I would have made different choices in my 20′s and 30′s, especially to save more for retirement, but I wouldn’t trade off the experience of having cradled my parents in good, loving care before their deaths. Death is part of the full life cycle, and caring for the elderly before death is, to me, as important as caring for children after birth. So I guess I have used up my luxury of a few years home on a less than typical route, but I just can see being able to afford it now.

Even though I would have been content being a stay at home mom and never going to work again, I am glad I chose to go back. When my husband lost his good living in 2008, it was my income that kept us alive. We would have lost everything. My income allowed extra money to put into savings for emergency and we had the income to fall back on when he was laid off.

ETA: those first 3 months are the hardest too, so for people who only do the 12 weeks leave, they probably don’t get much done. I didn’t until the baby was 2-3 months and could play independently for 10-30 minutes here and there. I think the OP said she got pregnant in 2011 so by now her kid is plenty old enough to play independently for a little bit.

I agree with Nicole that being in the house all day does make it dirtier. I’m not ashamed or insecure about the fact that my husband has come home from work on occasion to find the house a disaster and no plan for dinner. Are you saying I am just lacking in some way? Because it “ain’t that hard”? Sorry, but you sound like a smug know-it-all who can’t account for differences in people and circumstances. And I might add that you might be remembering those early years through rose colored (or at least self-serving) glasses.

My DH is now a professor and has about 4 months off from teaching each year and a lite research load, and so we are both hoping that eventually I’ll secure a administrative position at a university that runs as a 9month academic appointment. Our situation has always been changing so I quickly started making 6 month plans which is less overwhelming for me at this point. Kiddo is great, job is good, then we keep going until the balance feels off.

One of the biggest pitfalls I find of having both of us work is finding child care. It would definitely be easier if it was me or my husband caring for our kids.