Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #65749 in Books
• Published on: 1999-06
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 189 pages

From the Author
Have you ever considered tossing your Daytimer and staying home full time? We thought about it for years and, finally, we each took the leap from two incomes to one. We were certain that we would miss all the extra money, but in fact, we didn't. Once we got home it became clear that most of that second income was eaten up by the cost of working. And this included not only daycare, traveling expense, but the small hidden costs such as, lunches out, convenience foods, and take-out meals. We were shocked to realize that all the while we had been slaving away at our jobs, we were only adding a small dollar amount to the family budget.

We wrote this book because we want to help let people in on a little secret -- it costs money to work and sometimes it is cheaper to stay home with the kids. You can write to us at YouCanStayHome@aol.com

Customer Reviews

ARE THEY FOR REAL!
You Can Afford to Stay Home With Your Kids: A Step-By-Step Guide for Converting Your Family from Two Incomes to One (You Can Afford to Stay Home With Your Kids)

These authors have nothing to do with the world of the real people who have to work only to help with the basic bills and nothing extra.
First I want to make clear that I didn't spend any extra money that I don't have on their book, but it was given to me by one of my working friend who bought it and decided to keep working for many of the reasons I am addressing below.
The regular $50 haircuts and the weekly manicure tells it all about the "difficult" life Malia McCawley Wyckoff, Mary Snyder had to endure! Tough! We the average working folks buy our shampoos and hair color at the local discount store and we do our nails ourselves. Same with the lunches out: have they ever heard of taking a lunch box to work? Didn't they see those sold at office supply stores which are principally not targeting little kids? As for their groceries and other home supply shopping, where do they go to spend so much? Gelson's? Neiman Marcus? I have news for these condescending authors: we go to Marshalls, Ross, Target, Costco and the 99 cts store.
Who cares about the color of the towel! It's the price of the towel that counts.

OK, you are a young couple with 1 or more children and one of you (usually the woman) follows the advice of these well thinking authors to quit the "outside" working force.
Here it is: yes you will save on expenses such as housekeepers, drycleaners, babysitters, lunches out, working clothes, hair dressers, manicures, take-out dinners ...etc because the stay-at-home-mom will do it all for FREE.
I should add that eventually you will also save on movies, concerts, plays, nice restaurants, trips, vacations, a new car...etc because it won't fit into your budget anymore.
If she can take the subtle abuse of the "so, what do you do the whole day long, aren't you bored?" that you get into your face on a regular bases..., if she accepts to be the first up at the crack of dawn and the last to turn off the lights when her ironing is done..., if she has no problem begging her husband for a few extra bucks for that dress she needs for her cousin's wedding or that perfume she can't afford anymore..., if she is ready to deserve a credit card with her name on it only if her husband asks for it..., if she is ready to have no credit history by herself and to have to depend on her husband's signature..., if she is ready to gradually lose her husband's interest in her activities - why should he care if little Billy's favorite T-shirts became pink in the morning wash or if the vacuum cleaner needs repair? Why should he see that she scrubbed the stains on the carpet or if she dusted the shutters? I mean, she can always try to tell him how she found a better way to cut the onions as a conversation starter while he is watching the evening news half dozed off on the couch or later as he swallows the dinner she "prepared from scratch" for 2 hours..., if she is ready to skip the basic medical visits because her expensive insurance has a big deductible..., if she is ready to have non-stop days from 6 to midnight with nothing to show for it, then GO FOR IT GIRL, but be also ready later when the kids reach the college years. Suddenly, the one income is not enough to help for the ongoing house payments, the car payments, the extravagant college tuitions and mostly her still high insurance coverage since she doesn't have a job to cover her medical or dentist needs. She looks for a job but her skills are outdated or she won't be hired at her age. If she is aggressively searching she will eventually find a minimum wage position, most of the time a part-time one. One day she will receive in the mail a letter from Social Security, and she will discover that she has not accumulated enough work points to be eligible for anything. Now, how does that sound to be a home maker, 24 hours on call, with only your husband's retirement funds to share while you are still scrubbing and saving? This is all of course the idealistic situation without accidents, deaths, illnesses, divorces, depression...etc. I'm not even going there.
The way out at that point is to write a book about your situation and to find a publisher and to make some needed income with it.

Very Helpful
I found this book very helpful in making my transition to a SAHM. I especialy like the section on cleaning and making your house run smoothly with little effort.

Recommended in conjunction with Miserly Moms
What I liked best about this book:

1. The chapter on contingency plans. Yes, it's obvious that it's a good idea to have a backup-plan in case the working parent gets laid off, there's a large unexpected expense, etc. Nevertheless, I found it helpful to read the authors' experiences regarding such emergencies which happened in their families and to consider the various ideas and options presented. My own contingency plan was that I worked fifteen months longer than I wanted to and progressively worked up to putting my entire paycheck in savings; by the time I quit, we had enough money set aside to pay our living expenses for an entire year, if that became necessary.

2. The chapter on stay-at-home blues. I appreciated the authors' candor in describing the pros and cons of staying home. A humorous (but true) example they give is that you won't necessarily fall in love with cleaning the bathroom and once home, you may do it more often than you did before. Most importantly, they're honest about the feeling of isolation that can creep up on a stay-at-home parent and how one can deal with it.

3. They "tell it like it is". As they say, unless one of the parents' incomes is completely disposable, it is going to be necessary to make some sacrifices somewhere. Something will have to go in order to keep the family's financial boat afloat. My family experienced this period of adjustment while saving for our emergency fund; by the time I left work, we were already used to managing on one income and it wasn't so difficult.

I address the chapters on the "cons" of staying home specifically because if most people pick up a book like this in the first place, it's probably because they already want to be home with their child(ren). What they want to know is how to achieve that goal and what to expect along the way. I found this book a terrific primer on how to get off the fast track in the smoothest possible manner.

The reason I recommended this book in conjunction with Miserly Moms by Jonni McCoy is that I feel the latter book presents a larger share of nuts-and-bolts information on how to reduce expenses. Jonni McCoy once worked as a senior buyer for Apple Computers, among other firms, and you can see this real-world experience in how she analyzes and approaches the issue of frugality.