Income planning so you can be at home with your baby
Friday, May 16th, 2008If your goal is to live on one income so the children can have their mom at home, start from there and make the finances work by committing to that goal.
Next you research your existing spending patterns by documenting all the details of your current lifestyle. With baby coming you need to add to this amount the expected costs of raising the child. The exercise of gathering the information is not to judge the spending; it is to make sure you know what amount of monthly income will be required to support your family in this new lifestyle.It will not work simply to say you need to replace the pre-working income of the mother.
I had a multiple 6-figure income to replace when my daughter was young, and it wasn’t until I realized that I was jealous of my nanny that I got committed to finding a way to make the finances work so I could stay home. I first put a plan together to give us some extra cash in the bank that we planned to draw on while I invested in developing a writing and teaching business. This meant preparing detailed financial projections so we could make informed decisions that balanced lifestyle spending with business and investments to enable our desired stay-at-home lifestyle to be funded.
The options available to earn income outside of going to work full-time are endless. It takes a commitment, a very specific monthly financial goal, a documented plan, and a supportive and knowledgeable financial professional to help put all the pieces together.
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