Our 2007 Finances – Moving to a Single Income Family
December 31, 2006
Family First
The year 2007 may be a financially challenging one for our family. After much thought and discussion we decided to put family before money and have my wife stay at home with our new son. We’ll drop to a one income family halfway through the year which will end our 7 ½ year run of saving around 30% of our annual income.
Financial Strategies
We’ve crunched the numbers and determined that we can get by financially on one paycheck, luckily mine is bigger, but we’ll definitely have to make some adjustments. Unfortunately we’ll have to reduce our savings rate quite a bit but there are three things that will help us keep saving as much as possible:
1) Be More Frugal
Our largest expense is our mortgage payment and short of moving this won’t change. We have no debt other than our house payment so there is a lot of wiggle room in most of our other expenses. Since there are a million ways to save money, being more frugal will be a dominant theme this year. The less we spend, the more we can save.
2) Increase Alternative Income
Ah, the elusive search for other streams of income. Currently eBay sales are the main source of our alternative income. My wife is going to jump into the eBay game as well, I’ll pass on everything I’ve learned to her. In addition, I have several other plans in the works. Not sure if they’ll all pan out but as I’ve learned from Seth Godin, you’ll never know if you don’t try!
3) Increase Salary
A successful year at work led to a terrific performance review, which sets me up for a promotion next year. This isn’t really a pure personal finance strategy but more of a matter of good timing. Luckily my hard work looks like it will pay off. The more I can earn, the more we can save.
All posts by Ben Edwards
Jenn, thanks for the well wishes and advice! I’ll have to pickup a copy of the complete tightwad gazette. Glad to hear things are going well for you as a SAHM!
Hi! Found your post via the festival. Just wanted to wish you the best of luck! I’ve been a SAHM for almost two years now and really love it.
One word of caution though, sometimes it is just easier to save money than to try to increase alternative income. I know I’m not a regular reader of your site, so I don’t know where you guys are coming from, but if you haven’t read it before I highly recommend reading the complete tightwad gazette. Some of the ideas are really out there, and some of them are right on-but it will give lots of food for thought on thinking of different ways that you could cut expenses.
Again, good luck!
My wife and I moved to a single income about a week after we got married, and it has worked out all right for us so far. We do not have any children yet, though; she quit her job to go to law school.
Our goal is for her to finish law school and find a job before we starting having children. Hopefully, by that point I will be able to take my alternate streams of income as my major income source and can then switch so that hers is the single salary. Then once we have kids I can stay home and we would only need day care in the mornings or a few days per week.
That’s the 5 year plan; no idea at this point if things will work out that way.