What is the reasonable HHI income for wife to stay home?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DH makes over 700k as a base salary and I don't want to stay home, but that's just because we've grown into our lifestyle and we want to send all 4 kids to whatever school they want. I guess if our mortgage was paid off, each kid had $300k in their 529 plan and I felt really really solid about our marriage, I'd more seriously consider staying home at DH's current income since I've already saved a decent amount in my 401k and brokerage account. I'm not complaining this is "reasonable" but it's my reality.

Somewhat similar. Wear is your total networth including home?

Where

[Anonymous]

My husband makes 90k and I’m a SAHM. We live in Alexandria. We plan on homeschooling our 3 kids. We probably wouldn’t have been able to make it work if I didn’t have a high paying career before kids. I paid off the mortgage so my husband’s paycheck is enough to cover taxes and other expenses.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Your opinion DCUM? What would be ok income for someone to stay home? Meaning if only one spouse working?

Any income, as long as..

- you have a nest egg that's growing and won't be touched and will be enough to sustain your lifestyle at retirement
- if you don't have such nest egg, you are able to contribute towards such nest egg and meet your retirement goals
- if remaining income is enough to comfortably take care of your expenses right now as well as in the future

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My DH makes about 320k and I could SAH on this. I make 250k and he could SAH on my income as well. However it would greatly hamper our financial goals.

Literally exact same salaries for me and my husband but we couldn’t do it. We have three kids in various stages of preschool ($15K each) that we would want them to keep attending and a PITI of $6350. Plus we are trying to make up for about a decade of underfunding our retirements earlier in our careers. To each their own!

We have a very different scenario. We had our kids very young (early 20s) so we now have teens. Our PITI is 1900 because we got in the property ladder early, as kids made us grow up fast. We also both went to GMU and never went to grad school so graduating debt free and getting a white collar job at ages 21 & 22 made a huge difference. We did have a nanny for 7 years and those were lean years.