Reply to How much to live comfortably as family of 4 in NWDC?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP here. I guess I’m having a tough time figuring out what our normalized budget looks like. We currently outsource A LOT to manage two working parents with young kids. With 1 parent at home a lot of those expenses would go away but not completely. We want to be able to pay for all the extras like bi-weekly cleaning, summer camps, orthodontics, maintenance on our $2.5mm house, travel internationally 1x per year ($20k) etc. We’ve been so focused on working and investing, that we don’t have a great handle on what a normalized budget looks like. [/quote]

What costs would go away if you stopped working?

I think you'd spend almost as much now, TBH. I stayed home for a while with kids and while I was willing to cut way way back to make staying home with kids possible, it doesn't sound like that's your mindset.

Why not just stay home for a few years?

[/quote]

I am a SAHM.  When we decided that I will stay at home,  I wanted to make sure that I still had a support system at home so that it would be worth it for my kids to have a mom with multiple college degrees taking care of me. [b] If my DH had become a SAHD, he would not have done it without a support staff. So, why would I have done that? [/b] And that meant that - we had weekly cleaning, we had orthodontics, we had some tutors who came home, we had a landscape service, we travelled internationally to Asia, we got takeouts frequently.

What we did not have - a $2.5 million home (ours cost 300K), kids in private school (went to public magnet), new expensive cars (we had Japanese cars and they lasted for many years), no student debt, no expensive childcare, no pets, only 2 kids, no spa treatments or hair coloring, no designer clothes (everything was from Kohls, costco, JC penney, old navy and macys) and accessories.  [/quote]

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