This is one of the most common questions I received from colleagues when I made the decision to become a stay at home mom. And it was unnerving. The implication that I even had time to consider what I wanted to do felt like a deep misconception of the stay-at-home role.
Being a stay at home parent is a time consuming job especially if the family has any assets or liabilities. The more of either, the more work there is. My mother’s stay-at-home job included figuring out a plan to pay off our family’s six figure debt. My mother-in-law’s stay-at-home job included homeschooling the children and even running her own educational science programs.
Every family’s circumstances are different, but the responsibilities and burden placed on the parent at home is more than a full-time job. A sample set of responsibilities are:
The above set is for a relatively normal family with healthy children. For families with kids who have special needs or long-term medical illnesses, a mother’s job includes endless doctors’ visits and caregiving responsibilities. As children get older, for kids who pursue early careers in athletics, performance arts or other, they require the assistance and guardianship from their parents until they reach the legal age to make decisions on their own.
“Mommy!!!!!!” is the first thing I hear when I pick up my kid after school ends and also the last thing I hear when I tuck my child into their bed. When the schoolday ends is when the mom shift starts.
From 3PM to 11PM, there is continuous work. Here’s a sample schedule that most parents deal with:
This shift only covers: childcare, cooking and cleaning. The other responsibilities listed in our previous section are noticeably absent during these hours. Any remaining responsibilities are tackled in the meagerly available hours late in the night or during the subsequent day. Available hours are invisibly eaten up by banalities of more endless chores.
We created a calculator designed to help moms, like us, take stock of everything we do, so that we can:
By assigning a hourly wage for each of the areas we work on and the number of hours per week, we estimate how much an equivalent annual salary for our work at home would cost. In our case, roughly $110K after tax earnings is needed to hire the equivalent of what we do for our 80-hour-work weeks.
Assuming a combined 35% federal and state income tax, the pretax gross salary equivalent is $166,707.
Now think, does a job working 83 hours a week that pays $25 per hour after tax sound reasonable to you? Is it no wonder that moms often feel exhausted and overworked? Is there a way to outsource some of the jobs that moms do, so that she can have a more manageable workload? In our example above, if we were to outsource some tasks, that may mean a cost of $13,158 annually at $20/hour, but we would get back 13 hours per week which would be a blessing.
Our calculator is our attempt to quantify the time we dedicate to our role and the money we’re saving our family. It's intended to help us appreciate just how much stay-at-home parents do and recognize how unrealistic it is for us to "do-it-all".
Even supermoms need a break. The next time a mom seems tired, deranged, angry, or upset, just remember how much she’s doing and how little she’s recognized for it.
Try our SAHM Salary Calculator
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