Stay at home wife (not mother) - Page 2

Iheartcoffee · #16 Jul 29, '12, 2:12 pm

My husband has been a "stay-at-home husband" for a while now. We also have no children yet. The job market has been bad around here and he is always either over or under-qualified for things. He had a part time job for a while and it actually ended up costing us a lot financially because while he has been home he has been able to get a lot of things done around the house and cook healthy and inexpensive meals from scratch that have saved us a lot of money. He handles the budget, the grocery shopping, meal planning, errands, cleaning, etc. and it has allowed us to have more quality time together when I get home from work. We could sure use a bit more money, but unless he finds a full time job that pays decently, we have found that things are actually better for us if he stays home. His part-time job resulted in us spending no time together and resorting to more expensive, easier to prepare meals because we had no time together.

Sometimes, being a stay-at-home spouse can be a good thing financially. I would recommend finding ways to contribute financially by exhausting every money-saving opportunity available. There are a lot of things that can save you and your husband some serious money that simply requires time most people do not have when they are working.

FaithBuild18 · #17 Jul 29, '12, 7:13 pm

If you want to be a stay-at-home wife, I think that's great! If you want to work before you have kids, that's also great!

I really admire women who want to stay at home and be moms and wives. If you chose to work now, I do hope when children arrive you stay home and raise them. I think this is the one thing America needs more than anything else, in my honest opinion - good women who embrace what it really means to be a woman. If women were mothers and wives above all else, kiss abortion and divorce goodbye. Kiss same-sex marriage goodbye, since people would realize what a real marriage is. Kiss every other disgusting, perverted, deceitful cultural trend goodbye, as children would be raised knowing what is truth and what is lies, and what is good and what is evil.

anilorak13ska · #18 Jul 30, '12, 9:06 am

Thanks to both of you for your feedback. I definitely now hope to be a stay at home mom, if the Lord chooses to bless us with children. I've waited for many years for a child; there's no way I'd waste a single moment of it on a career, and let someone else raise my child. But alas, as I thought for years that our baby was just around the corner, I'm now realizing that I can't live like that. I don't know if or when the Lord will give us a child, so until then, I can't pretend I have important things to do at home when I really don't.

Iheartcoffee, thanks for sharing your experiences. That's something we've looked at too, how if I were to take any random full time job, I'd be getting the same annual income, give or take, but working 3,4, even more times as much! Currently, my job is very sporadic, but when I do get a class to teach, it pays well. And it leaves a lot of time for me at home. I guess I've bought into this idea that being outside the house is somehow more valuable, haven't I?

To be honest, I am not the best cook, and what's more, my husband loves meat and spicy food and I can't tolerate spicy food and meat is both more expensive and not what his personal trainer wants him to be eating right now. So part of the problem is that I'm trying to do what's best for his health and our finances before pleasing his palate, while he sneaks less than good for him food at restaurants. He's a LOT better than he once was, but old habits die hard. I'm not complaining about his spending just to complain about it, but rather as a way to work out for myself the fact that I cannot change him, so I have to change myself, if I want to somehow influence our income.

The other thing I don't understand is that when I suggest things like babysitting as income, he doesn't want me to do it. He'd like me to have a nice job I enjoy that pays well, but in the meantime...? So I'm off to do what I can.

johnsheppard · #19 Sep 22, '12, 7:16 pm

As others have noted, you and your husband need to become aligned as far as a monetary strategy goes. A written budget will do a number of things for you, not least of which will illustrate where your money is going or should go.

When your husband says "A nice job" what does he mean? You could get a job babysitting, cleaning houses, landscaping, doing interior design, any number of things that could bring in income - which fits the description of "nice job" to me.

Debt can be difficult to deal with, but this is a strategy that has worked for me. Collect all your bills and group the from smallest to largest. If two bills are in the same amount, put the bill with the higher interest rate first. Now, make the minimum payment on all of the bills every month. Take all the money you can squeeze out and try to pay the smallest bill of fastest. Once that is paid off, take that money and begin paying down the next largest bill, and so on. They call this the debt payment snowball. After a while, you are going to have increasingly larger payments to throw at your debts, as the smaller ones are paid off. You will be surprised how quickly this works.

Good luck.
John

anilorak13ska · #20 Sep 23, '12, 12:57 pm

Thanks all.
It turns out that the summer was just a dry period for us, and now that the fall semester has started, I'm actually working full time between my adjunct teaching and my boss giving me a part time admin job that I do around my teaching schedule (talk about the providence of God!). So now that we have this income, we are hitting our debt hard. We listened to I think it was Dave Ramsey's financial program, and that's the first place we heard about the snow-balling effect. So our finances are looking promising.

As for type of job, I think my husband doesn't want me to take a job that pays a lot less than what he knows I could get in another field, whereas I'm too self-conscious to put myself out there and apply for jobs that to me sound like they're out of my league. I'm working on this. I went to a job fair and had my resume looked at, and I'm slowly figuring out what type of work would be good for my temperament, skills, personality.

Having said all of that, one more raise and we'll be able to live completely off my hubby's income, which should also give me more flexibility in terms of the type of work that I can do.

The main problem I saw was that as an adjunct, I make more than most service industry full time workers make, so it makes no sense for me to double or even triple my work hours and take home less money. And I tried to just supplement my teaching with retail, but no one was interested in hiring me, presumably bc I'm "over qualified"

At any rate, my down time over the summer helped me focus more of my attention on being a better wife, so I'm glad for that.

Iheartcoffee · #21 Sep 23, '12, 1:05 pm

I'm glad to hear that things are working out. I think it is always best to make the primary goal one of being able to live off of one income if needed. Not to be pessimistic, but it is best to have a good savings strategy and be prepared for health problems, broken appliances, and whatever else is bound to come your way during your lifetime. The peace of knowing that you are debt free and you have savings is very helpful in life.

Plus, the better off you are financially, the more likely you will be able to stop and start working as needed if the baby you have been praying for comes along.