Living off one income question

[tirebob]

My wife and I have lived on a single income for the entire 23 years we have been together short of little small periods of time where she has done part time work in a short term temporary capacity. Even when she has made a little income, we have still lived on a lot less than what most people here consider to be "good money" for a single salary.

I definitely don't begrudge anyone who have double incomes but I shake my head when I hear people say they can't make it on what amounts to well over double, or even triple what we have lived on our entire lives, and I don't feel like we have missed out on anything at all. Even if you disregard the massive benefit of having our kids raised in our home by parents who love them and are not paid employees and that have developed into amazing young adults who can look out for themselves and still love their parents and have healthy relationships between themselves, the life we built together on less has been equally fantastic.

Sure some of my buddies have some pretty impressive toys like 6 figure trucks and 50k fishing boats etc, but I still get to the lake with my 40k mid level F150 pulling my 25 year old $1500 tinny but I still outfish every one of those guys! lol! I don't live in a baller mansion but I have a sick property in the forest with a cool old house I am not scared to live in. I have been able to travel and experience amazing places. Basically I get to do all the things that all my double income friends do, I just do it a bit smarter, and if anything, I enjoy it a lot more because it isn't treated like an afterthought.

Money isn't everything and nobody is getting out of here alive, so I would rather focus on family and experience rather than chasing the almighty buck hoping I get to retire and use it. My dad made that gamble and ended up dying of cancer before he got to use all his hard work and missed a ton of his kids growing up. He always used to get down on me and my sister for living in the moment and not planning for the future like he did, but before he died he confided in my mom that he realized to late that maybe he was wrong and that while we maybe don't have as much in the bank, we had something he was never going to have, and that is time with his kids and memories in the bank. That always sticks with me.

In the end, do what you feel necessary, but the best advice is to think about what is actually important to you and commit, no matter what direction you go.

[tonytiger55]

Side question for those who are doing it with one income.
Is it also a understanding of both parties or the one staying at home of their responsibilities to support the main income earner..? i.e cooking, cleaning, errand runs, klds etc

[hampstor]

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Side question for those who are doing it with one income.
Is it also a understanding of both parties or the one staying at home of their responsibilities to support the main income earner..? i.e cooking, cleaning, errand runs, klds etc

Still working on this 11 years later... it took me a while to get it through my thick skull that being stay at home is a lot of work, with no sick days, vacation days, and it's 24x7. In theory, when I leave the office I was off the clock. For my wife, she was was never really off the clock.

[benyl]

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Side question for those who are doing it with one income.
Is it also a understanding of both parties or the one staying at home of their responsibilities to support the main income earner..? i.e cooking, cleaning, errand runs, klds etc

Are there kids? If so, I would rather go to work and do all the chores than look after kids. Yes, I am selfish... haha

[you&me]

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Side question for those who are doing it with one income.
Is it also a understanding of both parties or the one staying at home of their responsibilities to support the main income earner..? i.e cooking, cleaning, errand runs, klds etc

Like Tirebob, we've only ever had one income, so I don't know family life any other way.

Our basic understanding is that her responsibilities are to do the things that keep the kids alive and allow me to work to support us, i.e. I'm not doing menial tasks that distract from work.

We like to make time for things that could be considered "quality family time", so we'll both cook (/together), run errands and attend the games & activities... We like to farm out the time-sucks that otherwise don't contribute to any meaningful time together - mostly cleaning and other household chores.

It works for us because my wife loves being a mom and wouldn't want it any other way, though I can understand the perspective of people that want some time away from the household (lord knows I couldn't hack being a stay-at-home-dad)... As with everything these types of topics turn into, there is no one-size-fits-all solution, but it's always interesting to hear how other families operate.

[RX_EVOLV]

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Side question for those who are doing it with one income.
Is it also a understanding of both parties or the one staying at home of their responsibilities to support the main income earner..? i.e cooking, cleaning, errand runs, klds etc

Quite the opposite, at least right now while my wife's on mat leave. She thinks (and I don't disagree) being at home looking after the baby full time is way harder than me going to work full time because I get to socialize, go out for lunch, etc.. so as soon as I'm home from work she is done and I take over everything, from cleaning the house, to running errands, to taking care of baby, etc...

[taemo]

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Side question for those who are doing it with one income.
Is it also a understanding of both parties or the one staying at home of their responsibilities to support the main income earner..? i.e cooking, cleaning, errand runs, klds etc

working is like a vacation compared to staying at home and doing chores/errands and taking care of toddlers 24x7

wife's main job at home is taking care of our daughter (even once she's back at work), I prefer cleaning and cooking anyway.

[pheoxs]

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Quite the opposite, at least right now while my wife's on mat leave. She thinks (and I don't disagree) being at home looking after the baby full time is way harder than me going to work full time because I get to socialize, go out for lunch, etc.. so as soon as I'm home from work she is done and I take over everything, from cleaning the house, to running errands, to taking care of baby, etc...

Don't babies sleep 14-16 hours a day in short chunks. I'm just curious, what does she do for the ~ hour or two when the baby is napping?

[arcticcat522]

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Don't babies sleep 14-16 hours a day in short chunks. I'm just curious, what does she do for the ~ hour or two when the baby is napping?

I DARE you to ask any stay at home mom that......please video tape it for us.

[The Cosworth]

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Everybody's situation is different. But budgeting helps. Discipline helps. My co-worker has been DINKS and seriously their careers didn't really start until late 40s and neither are making 6 digits. Wife insist on living off 1 income and everything else goes into savings and they were able to paid off $350K house and amass $1M of retirement from nothing in 15 years.

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Perhaps stating the obvious but if you're shocked to see your actual spending levels on a monthly basis then you definitely haven't been budgeting or paying much attention to cash going out the door. I've found keeping a budget and an eye on monthly bills helps to keep spending manageable and helps you focus and adjust on the important things. We've found that we're happier and healthier living on less rather than more. The whole 'mo money mo problems' is only a dilemma if you're actually spending more.

Being able to live off a single income is a good rule of thumb in terms of a safety net and in our current situation with 1 kid we'd be able to swing it and still put a bit of savings away. I'll need to crunch some numbers for two possibilities in the near future - upgrade into a bigger home and a 2nd kid. It might get pretty tight with a single income at that point but wife will likely always work for her sanity as she's lucky enough to find work that she enjoys and wouldn't consider not working until retirement age. We could probably do the single income thing with 2 kids if I considered investment income which I'm hesitant to do. The biggest variable totally within our control would be the size of the home we buy.

Shocked is maybe a stretch. We do budget and I was actually updating my 2020 budget over the weekend and looking at it. We stay within our budget but we had never broken it down into the 'needs' vs 'wants'. The needs or really wants was just a lot higher than I expected. If we did go 1 income and it was the wife's income, we would have to make some big changes to that 'really wants' category (i.e. eating out, camping trips, etc.). We're just coming off our second mat leave and we've been fine. That's because we could keep my salary though.

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Don't babies sleep 14-16 hours a day in short chunks. I'm just curious, what does she do for the ~ hour or two when the baby is napping?

In theory, for the first 2-3 months. But it is also in 45 minute to 1 hour stretches.

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working is like a vacation compared to staying at home and doing chores/errands and taking care of toddlers 24x7

wife's main job at home is taking care of our daughter (even once she's back at work), I prefer cleaning and cooking anyway.

Yeah funny enough, each year my wife has been on Mat Leave I've had vacation days to carry over. My 'me' days where I sit at home and play video games in non-existent because if I go home, I'm watching the kids. haha

[benyl]

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I DARE you to ask any stay at home mom that......please video tape it for us.

Kid #1 is in grade 4 and kid #2 is in all day kindergarten 2 days a week. I don't even ask what she does on the full days. I don't have a death wish.

[03ozwhip]

When I started working out of town 7 years ago, it was in large part due to issues with child care and me wanting my wife to stay at home.

So, that being said, the agreement we had, was that if she quit her job and I worked 70+ hours a week on a shift, her new job was to deal with home and everything that comes with it.

Maybe I'm lucky because she loves it anyways, but I do help tidy the house and sometimes help with cooking when I'm home, but things that are to be done at home, are done by her.

I'm on christmas break right now til the 9th, I'll be helping with everything while I'm here. Oh, and I still always do the "man" stuff.

[bjstare]

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Side question for those who are doing it with one income.
Is it also a understanding of both parties or the one staying at home of their responsibilities to support the main income earner..? i.e cooking, cleaning, errand runs, klds etc

In our house, yes.

That being said, I still help out with my daughter as much as I can. I don't get to see her nearly as much as I want to due to long-ish work hours, so it's great to be able to do the bedtime routine (for e.g.) when I'm home early enough.

edit: I also due all the "man" stuff. We subscribe to a traditional blue/pink job allocation.

[JustinL]

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Don't babies sleep 14-16 hours a day in short chunks. I'm just curious, what does she do for the ~ hour or two when the baby is napping?

Nap time is getting stuff done time with whatever you've got left in the tank. When there's nothing left in the tank it's time to just flop and hope the kid lets you rest a few minutes.

[Aleks]

10 years now with just me working. Decided wife would stay home with kids and she quit her O&G job. We have 3 kids now and this is the first year they are all in school full time. Unless I lose my job we don't plan to have her go back to work. School starts at 9 ends at 3:30. She drops them off and picks them up. When they are sick, have appts, early after school activities etc, it's nice never having to worry about that type of stuff for me since she's always taking care of it.

[Buster]

you guys are clearly not capturing the income potential of kids under 12. Just condition them early, and get those callouses built up. Man hands by 10, and then its cheap labour that you can leverage.

[tirebob]

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Side question for those who are doing it with one income.
Is it also a understanding of both parties or the one staying at home of their responsibilities to support the main income earner..? i.e cooking, cleaning, errand runs, klds etc

My wife definitely did the vast majority of the of the work around the home, especially in the earlier years because I too was young and dumb and figured staying at home was a cakewalk compared to working for a living. I know better now so when she asks for help you step up. Even better, step up and help before she asks. You will have a much happier home life if you see and acknowledge her extremely important contribution and help her where you can. I wish I figured that out earlier. I still have guilty feelings about thinking I was such a good husband by making it possible for her to "not have a job", when in reality she worked way harder than I ever could have imagined. Having an extra adult child while trying to raise little ones is rough and I thanks the powers that be every day she stuck it out with me and let me find my way!

[rx7boi]

Good for you, @hampstor . Sounds like your family formulated a strict budget and stuck to it.

Wife and I are a DINK so we've been spending the past several years building up extra in our investing fund. Now that she's back in school, it will provide a buffer for any extra expenses that might come up.

I have a full-time job and a couple contract projects coming up in 2020. Exactly what @killramos said. You gotta double play it with CB and MMM haha.

[Manhattan]

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My wife and I have lived on a single income for the entire 23 years we have been together short of little small periods of time where she has done part time work in a short term temporary capacity. Even when she has made a little income, we have still lived on a lot less than what most people here consider to be "good money" for a single salary.

I definitely don't begrudge anyone who have double incomes but I shake my head when I hear people say they can't make it on what amounts to well over double, or even triple what we have lived on our entire lives, and I don't feel like we have missed out on anything at all. Even if you disregard the massive benefit of having our kids raised in our home by parents who love them and are not paid employees and that have developed into amazing young adults who can look out for themselves and still love their parents and have healthy relationships between themselves, the life we built together on less has been equally fantastic.

Sure some of my buddies have some pretty impressive toys like 6 figure trucks and 50k fishing boats etc, but I still get to the lake with my 40k mid level F150 pulling my 25 year old $1500 tinny but I still outfish every one of those guys! lol! I don't live in a baller mansion but I have a sick property in the forest with a cool old house I am not scared to live in. I have been able to travel and experience amazing places. Basically I get to do all the things that all my double income friends do, I just do it a bit smarter, and if anything, I enjoy it a lot more because it isn't treated like an afterthought.

Money isn't everything and nobody is getting out of here alive, so I would rather focus on family and experience rather than chasing the almighty buck hoping I get to retire and use it. My dad made that gamble and ended up dying of cancer before he got to use all his hard work and missed a ton of his kids growing up. He always used to get down on me and my sister for living in the moment and not planning for the future like he did, but before he died he confided in my mom that he realized to late that maybe he was wrong and that while we maybe don't have as much in the bank, we had something he was never going to have, and that is time with his kids and memories in the bank. That always sticks with me.

In the end, do what you feel necessary, but the best advice is to think about what is actually important to you and commit, no matter what direction you go.

Preach! When you spend on the 'wants' and luxuries of life it becomes your new baseline very quickly. It's all about balance.

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Side question for those who are doing it with one income.
Is it also a understanding of both parties or the one staying at home of their responsibilities to support the main income earner..? i.e cooking, cleaning, errand runs, klds etc

I spent about 6 weeks on parental leave after wife went back to work for some bonding time but also to experience the stay at home life. Maybe it was too short of a leave but I valued every minute of it and found it more relaxing than working. However, the thing that got to me was how boring it was after a while as in it felt like ground hog day - wake up, feed, clean up, nap, feed, playtime, make dinner.

[Buster]