Reply to What is your income to allow one parent to stay at home?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]We were willing to sacrifice just about everything but necessities to keep me at home. [b] The first few years were rough. We lived in Raleigh, North Carolina on less $50,000.[/b]  My DH's income is about $160,000 now so while we are not rich, we are comfortable.  We moved away from DC and $160,000 feels like a ton of money here. I went back to work part-time when our youngest started middle school and that helped as well.

We only had one car but my DH had a work vehicle. That really helped. Almost all of our vacations were trips to visit family in different parts of the country. We lived overseas for a few years so we were able to travel some then as well. I budgeted very carefully. We limited activities to one per child. We were just really careful with our money back then. It's much easier to save with one parent at home.

[b]Our kids are grown now[/b]. Zero regrets. It was worth it for our family. [/quote]

You realize that $50k want a lot farther when you started staying home 25-30 years ago (or whatever) than it does now, right?[/quote]

Yes, things were quite different a generation ago.[/quote]

LOL,  more millennial excuses.[/quote]

C'mon you're delusional if you dont accept what's happened to the housing market and cost of higher education. [/quote]

I am the poster who was willing to sacrifice everything to SAH.  Think. $50,000 went a lot further 35 years ago.  My DH's salary would have been higher by today's standards.   It all comes down to how important being home is to you and to your family. We would have sold our home and moved into a tiny apartment to avoid daycare. It was that important to us. There are truly people who have no choice but to have both parents working.  But that is not the case for most people.  In DC you can afford to live comfortably on 80,000.  In my hometown you could easily live on 50,000.  You won't drive brand new cars, take expensive vacations, splurge on clothing,  send your kids to private school, or live in a grand home. But you will be present for your kids. For us there was no price tag on that.

Mine are college and beyond and I'm working in a job I love.  I have zero regrets about my 27 years at home.[/quote]

NP here, age 37. If your story started 35 years ago you are contemporaries of my parents. They bought their house in the California Bay Area for low 5 figures; it's now worth over $1 mil. Neither of them went to college but they were still able to get great jobs that put 2 kids through private school.  Mom has a pension that pays 80% of her salary for life.  It's a completely different world now and none of that is possible for people my age or younger.  It's great that you stayed home, but I cannot stay home on the 2016 equivalent of $50k.[/quote]
Depends where you live. The median HHI in the US is just over $50K, so clearly it's very very possible especially if you're living in a low COL area like NC (granted it's gotten much more expensive since PP lived there).[/quote]

Maybe in Greenville NC, but no way you can live where there are OK schoools in RTP like Cary even at 80k.

PP is easy to claim they would live in a small apartment, but rents rise rapidly and they would have been squeezed on one income. And generally good schools are in suburban hoods fed by SFH, so is she claiming she would have given her kids a disadvantage in life with poor schools so she could avoid the boogie man of daycare? Easy to talk now, but $50k 20 years ago was upper middle class and housing was crazy cheap compared to today because. Really she doesn't add much to discussion than her smug confidence of what she claims she would do today. 
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No 50,000 twenty years ago was not upper middle class.  It was just plain middle working class.  You millennial are out of touch of anything that happened more than five years ago.[/quote]

Haha, no I grew up in one of those flyover places like outside pre-boom RTP.  My parents working together earned about 50k in 1996, and we were definitely some of the wealthiest in our neighborhood.  Think about it: today, 20 years later, $50k is the national average income? 20 years ago, national average income was $35k. And again housing was dirt cheap.  It's okay, it's obvious you are another entitled boomer who screwed things up for Gen X & Y. Peachy. Would love to hear from SAHM who don't preach against daycare in a sidelong dig, and instead how they make it work in recent times with the high cost of housing, less stables jobs, on modest salary.[/quote]
I don't blame the boomers per se.  If we'd all just stayed home we wouldn't be in this mess.  But noooo, we had to be "equal" and enter the workforce en masse and now the market has adjusted prices on everything to reflect dual incomes so either your DH has to be a senior partner or you have to work too in order to make ends meet.  Should have stayed barefoot and pregnant with the spatula in hand.  :(

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