Many working women fantasize about the possibility of being an at-home parent. However, these dreams tend to zero in on the benefits: doing the household chores at a leisurely pace, greeting the kids with a plateful of homemade chocolate chip cookies, or being there when the baby decides to take her first step. What’s missing is the dose of reality many suddenly face when they discover the cost for quitting their job.
If you’re feeling unorganized or overwhelmed because you don’t know where to begin, have never lived on a single income before, or need to put your new lifestyle into perspective, the following tips and tricks can help you make the switch to becoming a stay-home parent easier.
Put Away Your Need for Perfection
While a well-organized home runs more smoothly, give yourself time to make the transition. Moving from convenience foods and eating out several times a week to lower-cost menus and old-fashioned home cooking will take a period of adjustment. So will learning how to stretch a dollar by cutting back on expenses, limiting the kids’ activities and desires to fit within your new budget, and finding substitutes and free things to do that won’t cause you to feel deprived.
In the beginning, things will be a bit chaotic, and you’ll make mistakes, but put away any tendencies towards perfection and think of your new-found freedom as a challenge. Many have succeeded in making a one-income family work, and so can you.
Sit Down and Get Busy Crunching the Numbers
Once you’ve relaxed your expectations and given yourself permission to make mistakes, it’s time to sit down and take a good look at your current lifestyle. Write down everything you’re used to spending money on, how much you spend on each item, and how often. Until you have a good grasp on what you’ve been doing and how you’ve been living, you can’t begin to figure out how to restructure your life.
While almost all one-income families will need to make cuts and changes, the degree of change required is individual. So take the time to figure it out. Crunch the numbers so you have something to work with. While one family might need to reduce their cable television expense from a premium package to basic, another might need more drastic measures – give up television completely and switch to yard-sale VCR movies instead.
Either way, staying home is a life-changing event since you must now find creative ways to make your expenses fit within a single income. But don’t despair. You’ll now have the time and energy to learn how to do things you’ve never had time to learn before.
Start Reducing Costs by Cutting Down on Grocery Spending
Many stay-at-home mothers suggest newbies begin by cutting back on groceries, since food tends to be a major expense; especially for working moms. However, changing what you eat and how you cook won’t be easy. Most working families spend a lot of money on convenience foods and eating out, so start with the basics. While buying in bulk is often recommended to save money, it may not fit your current budget and abilities. Either try to limit your purchases to what’s on sale that week, what’s marked down on clearance, or what carries a budget price in your local area.
For example, after scouting out all of the available stores where we live, the cheapest meats are:
- chicken leg quarters, 68 cents a pound in a 10-pound bag
- boneless, skinless chicken breasts, $1.88 a pound
- ground turkey, $1.99 in one-pound rolls
- ground pork, $2.77 a pound
- sale pork chops, less than $2 a pound almost every week
Beef, and even hamburger, is especially expensive here – over $3.50 a pound for the 80% lean variety – so we rarely eat hamburgers or use ground beef in recipes. We do, however, substitute ground turkey or make ground pork burgers; and I take chicken breasts, horizontally sliced, and simmer them in spaghetti sauce, then serve over pasta – rather than making a traditional meat-sauce spaghetti.
While learning to shop and cook with what’s on sale or marked down is essential, the key to saving money on groceries is to find creative ways to make your current recipes work with what you have available. Also, be willing to sub out higher cost ingredients in your recipes (like mushrooms or olives) for something that is less expensive and more substantial.
Additional Tips and Ideas
If you need to learn how to make that one-income lifestyle change right away, but don’t know how, here are some additional ideas to get you going:
Separate Needs from Wants: After getting your current lifestyle down on paper, divide those expenses into needs and wants. While staying home with your kids usually means some form of sacrifice, figuring out what you can live without is a good place to start. If you’re used to going to the hairdresser every week, stopping by to pick up a pizza on Friday night, or taking the kids to every new movie they want to see, many of those types of activities may no longer fit into your budget.
Clipping Coupons: Clipping coupons is not necessarily a good option. Most coupons are for highly processed convenience foods or overly-priced non-food items. If you save 25 or 50 cents on a product you wouldn’t buy if you didn’t have a coupon, you’re losing money. While coupons for meats, dairy products, and other basics do pop up now and then, beware of any impulse to buy something just because you have a coupon.
Snack Foods: Kids need snacks, but they don’t have to be expensive, individually-wrapped dried fruits and chips, or cute-shaped crackers. Gravitate to more basic items like apples, oranges, or bananas, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, celery and carrot sticks dipped in homemade Ranch Dressing, small containers of cold cereal, or simple graham crackers and milk.
Non-Food Items: For me, the easiest and quickest way to save money on cleaning supplies was to learn to consolidate. You don’t need ten different products. I use window cleaner or a powdered cleanser for almost everything, but a simple, all-purpose cleaner would work well too. Also, try to cut down on the amount of bubble baths, lotions, and fancy soaps you buy until you get a better idea of what basic living expenses are going to be.
How to Ease Into Being an At-Home Mom
The easiest way to make the switch is to experiment with different tips and techniques on saving money before you quit your job. Seek out stay-at-home forums, egroups, library books, and frugal articles to find ideas that will fit within the boundaries of what you are willing to live with. Try out some of those suggestions, and play around with what works best for you – as those boundaries won’t be the same for everyone.
However, for many stay-at-home moms, attempting to live a more frugal lifestyle ahead of time isn’t possible. Therefore, you’ll need to sit down and figure out where your money is going, and then take the necessary steps to cut out everything you can easily live without. For some, that will be enough; but for others, you’ll have to keep cutting until you’re left with a lifestyle that fits within your current income.
While staying home is hard on the budget and means you’ll have to live without many things you’re used to having, the pay-offs of being able to attend Little League games, your daughter’s dance class, or teach your kids how to take care of a dog are well worth the price.
Vickie Ewell - Vickie has worked with autistic individuals for 9 years. She has celiac disease and specializes in gfcf living.
