Two working parents is very, very doable if you don’t choose to take these high travel/unpredictable hours types jobs. Sounds like you care too much about prestige. |
Full time help age 0-5 kids Afternoon help age 6-10 Housekeeper driver thereafter That or live near grandparents who pitch in a lot. Especially with long travel trips. |
You hire help and you prioritize your marriage over kids sports/activities/whatever.
We screwed up by not hiring help and prioritizing the kids activities. We spent our weekends going in different directions so the kids could play sports. We were too exhausted to do date nights during the week (plus the kids had homework, practice, etc.). Here we are at 50 and we’ve grown apart. Friends and family with a SAHM are much happier than we are. |
You could both grow up. You're married, not a sexy bf and gf anymore. Also, 400k HHI is a lot of money, even in DC. |
+1 and 2700 for mortgage is smart if it enabled them to buy something close in because if this was anytime in the last 20 years, that home appreciated well and they got great earned equity out of it. Or maybe it was farther out but paid off. A mortgage is not too high as long as you can make the payments and the house holds value, as it's a form of savings with potential for investment returns as well. It was especially a no brainer when rates were low, it's a trickier proposition now. But if people can make that happen on a 150k income, it's one of the best things they can do with their money. |
This, so many jobs don't require travel at all, or very minimal travel. I think people enjoy the self-importance of business travel, plus I thinks sometimes people with young kids like business travel because it gets them away from their kids. I traveled a lot for work before having kids and then moved to a job with zero travel when we decided to have children. My DH travels once or twice a year but it's planned well in advance so it's not too hard to figure out. We just view this as the stage of life we are in. We've talked about me going back to a higher-frequency travel job after the kids leave for college, and DH moving into something more consulting base so that he could travel with me. There might even be an opportunity for me to work for one of my current clients overseas for a bit, and we could relocate for a few years. But that's not the phase of life we are in now. Now our focus is our kids and creating a stable and happy home life for them to grow up in. That means minimizing work travel and maximizing how much we are both present at home to the extent we can. |
Not on that income with a $2700 mortgage. |
Exactly this. You make your choices and then you live with them. I quit a more interesting, prestigious job to work in a school so I would have better hours and summers off. You can’t have it all, so I prioritized what was most important to me. |
+1 |
Excellent advice! I think DMV puts too much emphasis on work achievement and not enough on all the other good parts of life. Kids grow up and leave and you don’t get that time back. |
+1 you either need one person to have a slightly less "prestigious" job that's more W-L friendly (WFH, less travel, etc.) - you should be able to do that without a huge pay cut. Or one person leans in and gets a higher paying private sector job. So more $ for outsourcing. Our salary bracket is similar but we picked jobs that were less demanding (but maybe don't check all the boxes in your first post). There are a lot of DC jobs like that. |
I find the work that I do intellectually fascinating and the hours I put in beyond 40 have opened up so many opportunities I wouldn't have had otherwise. I'm not trying to impress anyone, I just really care about what I do. If that's not where you're coming from, of course it makes sense to prioritize being less stressed out. But if you do, it's a real loss to give up the potential for career advancement, which affects you not just now but for the years when your kids are off living their own lives. Being intentional about how you want to spend your time is great, but the answer isn't necessarily going to be working less. |
Then don't have kids, or have kids with someone who will take up the slack so that you can work your extra hours. There is no scenario where all the adults pursue their intellectial passions >40 hours a week and the kids also get what they need. |
My husband works about 40 hours a week. But what I was responding to said very little about the kids, it was about how it's so nice to be more relaxed and sleep and eat better, not about the kids, and how unless you're a surgeon your work just isn't that important and you're doing it to impress people. And that's just not my experience at all. I'm happy to trade off for more stress because I really like what I do. |
No, I'm the one who wrote that and it's about all of it. Being more relaxed and eating/sleeping better is directly related to the kids, and the marriage. You only have so many hours in the day and you chose to have a family. So the trade off is not just about what YOU are willing to sacrifice for your job. When you carry that stress around because your job is so important to you, your family has to carry it too. Maybe with some jobs that weight feels worth it to the family. If you are saving lives or in a leadership role where you are having a huge impact, your spouse and kids might be able to feel like they are contributing to that with their sacrifice too, and that can make the family trade offs easier to bear. This is how many military families function. But if it's just a job you personally find intellectually stimulation and enjoy doing, but where the social importance is more mundane, your spouse and kids are unlikely to feel like what they sacrifice for your career is worthwhile. They'll just resent it. |