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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Where is gender equality here? If I was the breadwinner husband and if my wife decided not to work anymore,  I think I would lose some respect for her. Will most of those marriages end when one of the sides hit a mid life crisis? [/quote]

By our third date, my husband was telling me he only wanted to marry a woman who would continue to work after marriage and kids. I appreciate his forthrightness and as I never had any interest in SAH, we ended up getting married and being dual WOHP.  My guess is that most people discuss this extensively with prospective spouses.[/quote]

I think that’s a really unfair thing to ask of a woman. You’d never had a baby before - what if you’d changed your mind once you actually gave birth? And your husband will never know what it’s like to give birth. Also, that just seems slimy to me of your husband to ask that. To me it sounds like, “I don’t care how you feel when you actually have the baby. The most important thing to me is that you keep making money for us.”[/quote]

The point is, we both agreed that neither of us had a choice to SAH. We bought a house with a mortgage that required two salaries. I'm not really the kind of person who has changed her mind much as an adult.  It's not slimy; he saw his dad live under tremendous stress because his was the sole income. Who wants that kind of stress? The important thing is that we were both clear from the beginning about what we wanted, and communicated that to the other early on the relationship.[/quote]

It sounds like you created stress by your spending choices.  We bought a house we could afford on one salary just in case one of us lost our jobs.  [/quote]

Same. We've made a lot of financial choices that keep us below our means specifically so we'd have flexibility when we had a kid. Me SAHMing for a while was totally doable on one income, even with our mortgage. And I'm not married to a high earner. I think he was making 90k at the time? But we had lots of savings and a low mortgage and it was doable for 4 years.

But one of the best parts is that now that I'm working again, we are seeing a huge increase in our income right when it feels most useful. When our kid was really little, we weren't dying to go on big, expensive vacations. We didn't need a bigger house, we didn't want new furniture or a new car that would just get wind up with crackers ground into the upholstery. Now we have a school age kid and our income has doubled, plus we are accustomed to eating at home, figuring out how to get good quality toys and kids clothes on the cheap, etc. So we feel super rich even though we're middle class. And our kid is in public school so all we pay for is aftercare and summer camp, which seems like no big deal on our current HHI, after being very careful with our spending for the last few years. We're putting most of the added HHI into savings and still getting to spend a bit more freely everyday in ways that feel luxurious to us. We'll probably move to a bigger home in the next 4 years or so, but we're not stressed about it even with the price increases, because we have a ton of equity in our current small house because we stayed here longer instead of upgrading pre-kid, and our house fund is growing fast thanks to our frugal outlook and my income.

The idea that having one parent stay home is automatically a bad financial choice is weird to me. It's true that the amount we saved on childcare was a lot less than my salary. But it's also true that learning to live on less when your kids are young can pay huge dividends, as we are currently seeing. Even if it wound up costing us money in the long run (I'm sure it did, realistically) it's worth it because we were happy -- happy kid, happy parents, calm house. Especially with Covid! Obviously we didn't see that coming but when Covid hit, we were definitely glad we had a SAHP rather than relying on out-of-home childcare. [/quote]

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