Reply to Are you happy as a SAHM of school aged kids? Why or why not?

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[quote=Anonymous]OP I can totally relate, I think about this a lot too! I work outside the home with a 3 year old and a 6 month old (in daycare) and, while it's tough, I really don't want to stay home all day with them either.

But once they're in school? God yes it is tempting. With the free time I would work out, grocery shop and cook more for my family, do more tasks around the house rather than outsource them, garden, pick up a hobby, etc. It sounds perfect to me.

There are three reasons though why I don't think I'll ultimately end up doing this:

1) My salary is good, and if I stopped working it would be a pretty significant hit to our lifestyle. We'd have to leave the city, which we love, and travel less, which we also love. Maybe once we actually get to this point in life, which is a good 5+ years away, I'll run the numbers and we'll decide it makes sense but right now, losing 50% of our HHI would totally slice our lifestyle in half. Maybe we have to wait for all our student loans to be paid off, which is still another 7 years.

2) I am fortunate in that I do actually like my career. I don't like working 40-50 hour weeks, I don't like commuting every day, I don't like having no free time - but I do enjoy the work, keep up to date in my industry, have ambition to do more, etc. I worry that if I 'jumped out' I would miss it a lot and feel personally unsatisfied as I watched my former peers continue to excel and develop in their careers. This is actually an argument in favor of leaving the area altogether if we do this - I'd probably need a really fresh start to not feel like I was watching my old life pass me by.

3) My kids will be out of the house by the time I'm 50, and then what? H will still probably be working for another 10-15 years after that (maybe longer, since I will have stopped contributing to retirement). I feel like at that point I might really regret jumping out of the workforce and struggle to get back into it. And, again, the financial situation will be such that we won't be able to have as long and well-funded retirement as we will if I keep working this whole time.

It's totally still on my mind though and probably something I'll constantly re-evaluate as my kids get older. As my husband often says, I can do anything I want just not everything.

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