Can you afford to stay home part 3

I’ve been writing a series showing how you can be a stay-at-home mom even though you may think you can’t afford it. You can read part 1 here and part 2 here if you’d like to get caught up first.

Today I thought I’d focus on what you’re spending to be a working mom and show you how eliminating those expenses can make a huge difference. Most working mothers probably have to pay for child care. I know there are many who might have family members available to watch your children but for the most part I think child care is probably a pretty big expense. I have never paid for child care myself but from a little bit of online research I found costs to be anywhere in the $400 to $500 range all the way up to the $1200 range per month. Depending on how much your income is that could be a very large percentage of it!

Another expense you most likely have as a working mom is extra car expense. You probably have a car with a car payment, gas to pay for, you might have tolls that you have to pay to drive to and from work, and car maintenance fees to pay for. As a stay-at-home mom you wouldn’t have the same expenses for obvious reasons – you wouldn’t be driving to work every day. In fact, as I shared yesterday, you might not even need to own a second car. You might be able to share a car between you and your husband, which would enable you to get out of a car payment. My husband and I did this for years and it worked really well. It also saved us hundreds of dollars a month!

I would imagine that another big expense for working moms is a dry cleaning bill. I can’t say from experience but I’ve heard many people talk about having to pick things up at the cleaners and I would guess that it could get pretty pricey. One great thing about being a stay-at-home mom is that you don’t have to dress up in fancy clothes every day. You can wear comfortable, fun clothes! Your kids don’t care what kind of outfit you have on.

Eating out for lunch and/or dinner would be another big expense. I know a lot of working people tend to eat at a restaurant or a fast food place for lunch each day rather than taking their lunch which adds up to quite a bit of money by the end of the month. If you eat out for lunch each day you’re probably spending a minimum of $100 to $150 a month just on lunch. It’s also probably a lot easier to pick something up to take home for dinner after working all day than to go home and cook a meal. I know I wouldn’t want to come home and cook after being at work all day! So, if you do that frequently you’re probably spending a minimum of another $300 for dinners (if you’re buying for the whole family). That, along with what you’re spending for lunches, is enough money to buy a month’s worth of groceries! And you’re going to be so much healthier if you’re eating food that you’ve prepared rather than eating fast food.

Something else that might not immediately come to mind as an extra expense is house cleaning. Many women just don’t have the time to devote to house cleaning when they’re working a full time job so they hire someone to come in and clean for them. Think about what you spend monthly to have someone do for you what you could easily do yourself if you were home. I would say a conservative amount might be about $200 a month for house cleaning.

Now these are just a few things that you might be paying as a result of working. I’m sure there are many more expenses that I haven’t included here. But take a look back at the amounts, which I admit are just guesses, and see how much it amounts to a month. (I didn’t include an amount for dry cleaning because I’ve never done that and I don’t have any idea how much one would spend on that a month. I also didn’t include any dollar amounts for car expenses because that depends on how far you have to drive, whether or not you have a car payment, and things like that.) For the sake of coming up with a dollar amount for these expenses let’s say you have $400 in car expenses a month (including a car payment and gas). If you add that to the other things I have listed, the minimum amount of expenses is about $900 and it just goes up from there. If you subtract that from what your actual paycheck is, how much are you actually making? Now subtract all the things that I haven’t included here. How much is left now? Is it worth not being with your kids all day and letting someone else raise them in order to bring home that much money?

One last thing to think about – when you have two incomes you are more than likely putting yourself in a higher tax bracket and therefore paying much more in taxes than you would with a (lower) single income.

I’ve had some commenters leaving some great tips and sharing some good information. If some of you have some actual amounts that you spent on any of these areas I’d love for you to leave a comment sharing it. Putting actual numbers to it always makes it clearer for me – maybe it would for someone else as well.

Next week I’ll share some ideas for lowering your budget and learning how to live on less money than you think you might need. You’d be surprised at all the ways you can save money!