Category Archives: family

the myth of the parent that NEEDS to work

My wife is an extremely intelligent woman who decided to quit her professional career as a management-tracked analyst with a huge investment bank in order to be a stay-at-home parent when our son arrived. I would have willingly stayed home in her place but being older and further along in my career I was making twice as much as she so it would not have made sense. She has now been at home for almost two years and I have noticed that there is a subtle campaign against her choice, and it makes me angry. Despite all of the talk about mothers making the ‘tough choice’ to go back to work, I think the tough choice is staying home.

First of all, I know there are single mothers and poorer families who have no choice! I would maintain this is a very small proportion of the population, though. Single mothers definitely have no choice as the primary breadwinner, of course. Some families may have special circumstances that require both parents to work - health care costs spring to mind. I wonder, though, how many times the choice to work is the choice to support owning a second television, or keeping the premium movie channels, owning the house with the extra two rooms, or leasing a nice car - versus staying home with a child.

My family took a big hit to our finances when my wife quit work. We went from two people living in a two-bedroom apartment on two salaries to three people living in a three-bedroom house on one salary. We did it by making huge changes in our spending, and after a couple of years those changes have - surprise - become fairly routine. We understood that we could not afford as many luxury vacations or idle purchases of gadgets and jewelry and so on. The reward was that our son has been able to stay at home with his mother and be in a safe, healthy, fun environment.

This setup has not come without cost. My wife misses adult companionship and the sense of validation that you get from a professional position. We miss having the second salary, which for a while was all being plowed into savings and made for a relatively large down payment on our home. And of course my wife worries about her future job prospects once Little Buddy starts school and doesn’t need a stay-at-home mom. But the worst thing, recently, has been the assault on her decision by other women.

Bubelah relays conversations to me from her friends and ex-colleagues and so on where the subject is inevitably "when are you going to get back to work?" Aside from the obvious insult that caring for a child is not "work", this has a very negative effect on her state of mind. She usually laughs it off, but the simple fact is that she doesn’t really interact on a daily basis with anyone but me who supports her decision to make child care a full-time job. We don’t feel that the trade-off of getting another salary is worth having our son in day-care 10 hours a day before he’s even 2 years old, but that’s what we’re being told we need to do.

However, we don’t need the money, frankly. We may not be able to spend freely like our friends do (particularly since we also don’t take on any debt) but we really don’t NEED any more money to meet our current expenses. If Bubelah got a second job a lot of her salary would go to paying for day care, nannies and babysitters. I understand that sometimes both parents want to work. That is fine, but just be honest about that choice. Many people claim to be "forced" to work two jobs to make ends meet, but is it really "making ends meet" when you drive a new car and have premium movie channels and take a vacation to Aruba every year?

the space between

In America, many families are scattered far and wide across the continent; some may even be living overseas. Approximately 100 years ago, my mother’s family all lived in one area of one state, and my father’s family lived in an even smaller ethnic community in one state. Traveling was of course more difficult so while the distances might have been shorter the travel time might have been equal. Today I live approximately five hours by car from my parents and my brother and his family. I live a two-hour flight from my mother’s parents, and a three-hour flight from where my father’s parents lived. At various points in my life I have lived up to twelve hours’ flight from my family.

My wife, being an immigrant, has even odder situation. Her family, for the most part, emigrated en masse to the New York area, so they all live within approximately 1-2 hours of each other. Her relatives who didn’t emigrate, however, live almost a day away. My brother’s wife has a similar situation.

So if you start by considering my nuclear family of four people, our links to other family spread out across the globe rapidly. Various reasons are behind where we all live. I ended up in the New York area because of work and remain here for work, and for my wife’s family and for a general love of the City. My brother made a conscious decision to leave New York for a more affordable area for raising a family. My parents moved to be closer to my brother (and closer to me, although still fairly far away). My father’s parents had moved to a warmer climate. My mother’s parents have lived within a ten-mile radius for the last 40 years. My wife’s sister and her family have chosen to stay close to their parents, while my wife and I moved to a suburb of the city to have more space. The list can go on and on.

But what are the financial costs of being so scattered? Forget housing and wages, because I think that adjusts – usually – with the general cost of living in an area. I make more in New York than I would in Chicago, or in Lexington, Kentucky, but my costs are substantially higher, too.

My family goes back and forth to my in-laws on a regular basis. The trip takes a little more than an hour both ways, and with tolls and wear and tear on the car I figure a trip costs $25 or so, twice a month. No big deal. Going to visit my side of the family, however, is expensive. Flights to visit my grandparents are usually no cheaper than $250 per person. Right now Little Buddy flies for free, but soon he’ll have to have a ticket too. Then there’s parking, tolls and all the various to-and-from-the-airport costs, not to mention a hotel on arrival. I estimate a recent four-day trip probably cost over $1600 for the three of us to fly to see my grandparents:

  • $200 for meals
  • $700 for the hotel
  • $30 for tolls
  • $0 for parking since my in-laws drove us to the airport, but it would have been $100
  • $600 for the flight (fortunately we had vouchers for $250 of that, so a net $350)
  • $100 for other miscellaneous costs – food for Little Buddy once there, etc.

$1600 is no small amount of money. That’s almost half of what I put in my Roth IRA this year. Now imagine visiting people in more than two or three locations; the cost becomes prohibitive. Driving to visit my brother and parents is cheaper, although with gas prices and tolls I would guess it probably costs more than $100 each way in total, plus other expenses – a hotel if we don’t want to crowd them, and so on. We tried flying, but that experience was far more expensive, even with cheaper tickets ($125 apiece) and very unpleasant due to the weather.

So if I visit everyone in my family once a year and my wife’s family once a month, you’re looking at several thousands per year just in ‘visiting’ expenses. Since being close to your family and friends is a good indicator of your overall happiness I don’t have “never visit” as a solution. So how do you get around it?

  1. Don’t always visit family for holidays. I know everyone likes to be around family at Christmas or Passover or Arbor Day, but typically airlines charge more, hotels charge more and the travel experience will inevitably be worse due to crowding. Consider visiting near the holidays.
  2. Gather. Try not to visit one set of relatives one month, then one the next. Try to get people to agree to family reunions.
  3. Stay on the lookout for travel bargains. I found a cheap resort option one weekend that was halfway between my parents and me, and it was a nice way to spend a weekend without spending nearly as much money as the resort usually charged. I try to keep an eye out for airline bargains, although in a surprisingly noncompetitive market like New York they are few and far between (Continental dominates the routes I fly to visit family, and doesn’t give much on prices).

It’s certainly something we think about a lot, but with family scattered around it’s harder to move closer to some without moving farther from others. So for now, unfortunately, there will remain a space between us.

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