You can absolutely do this since you said no mortgage college or retirement savings necessary! That’s a huge amount of income. We make 350k but spend 125k on mortgage, retirement and college savings and we don’t want for anything. We have biweekly cleaners, classes, camps, lots of travel, good food. We don’t have fancy cars designer stuff expensive spa /plastic surgery stuff (although my hair is $$$) but we have a pretty comfy umc life.

But you need to run a budget. Track all your expense for six months and then analyze. Also go to the Reddit FIRE subs. Finally ensure you have a backup plan if the solo earner loses a job.

OP I think you might not be realizing the expenses that come with kids as they get older? Travel sports, lessons, school trips, camps/trips as they get really into an academic area, etc.

Anonymous wrote:I think we live a fairly comfortable lifestyle which includes eating out twice per week, travel sports for one kid and various enrichment for another, several vacations per year, etc. and we average around $16k per month which includes $2100/month for our PITA payment.

If you don't have to worry about housing and retirement or college, then I don't see why you wouldn't be fine at $20k per month.

That also includes $1750/month paying for health insurance through the exchange.

I think we live a fairly comfortable lifestyle which includes eating out twice per week, travel sports for one kid and various enrichment for another, several vacations per year, etc. and we average around $16k per month which includes $2100/month for our PITA payment.

If you don't have to worry about housing and retirement or college, then I don't see why you wouldn't be fine at $20k per month.

My question would be, why would one of you quit entirely instead of both scaling back a bit?
If you already have a job, it's a bit easier to ask for reduced hours or make a move to a lower stress position.
Having one income puts a lot of pressure on the remaining worker to never lose their job or it's financial ruin for the family. So it's increasing stress on one person while reducing for the other.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: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.

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?

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. If my DH had become a SAHD, he would not have done it without a support staff. So, why would I have done that? 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.

Anonymous wrote:You can’t BUY in NWDC on that kind of income. Rent, sure.

She said it would be a $2.5M house that’s paid off. This year we’ve spent nearly $50k on boring stuff happening to our house (leaks, a costly broken appliance, tree falling), so that would decimate them. Last year we spent zero.

Try it out for six months. Use your salary to pay only expenses you would HONESTLY eliminate if you quit (like aftercare), but be brutally honest - would you join a gym or need new hobbies if you were home more? With preschoolers, you will probably want to keep them on some school to prep for kinder so don’t pretend all childcare expenses will evaporate.

After you back those expenses out, save the rest. After 6-12 months, you will know if the switch would be worth it.