Hello everyone,
My wife has been considering whether to leave her job and try working for herself. I'm the primary income earner and she works part-time at the local library. Her retired father has a very small business (generates about 3K per year) and has offered to train her in the family business so she can take it over someday. She has many great ideas on how to expand the business that I think would work well. As a small business owner myself in addition to my full time job, this excites me greatly. This also gives her the chance to travel with me when I go overseas for work 3 - 4 times a year which an important plus. The only downsides are whether her business will grow enough to cover her current job's income and that I'll need to dedicate about 10 hours a month to help her with some logistics and accounting.
She currently makes about $10K per year or about 7.5K after taxes. Her expenses and contribution to her IRA total 6K per year, so at worst I will be covering her living expenses and the IRA contribution totaling about $500 per month or 6K per year. We have a lot of margin in our budget to support this as it will just mean saving less than we do now and potentially delaying FIRE by about 4 - 5 months (assuming worst case scenario) beyond our current planned 8.5 years from now.
This will be her first time working for herself. My only real concern is that I'm unsure if she's really cut out for it. She has many wonderful attributes, but being a proactive go-getter isn't one of them unfortunately. I know that it will make her happy to have a flexible work schedule and it will also give her a job she can do mostly from home when we have children in a few years. Her current job schedule is very inflexible, so we'll have more time to do things together and I'm sure she'll volunteer more which is something she enjoys. I estimate that she'll be able to earn $60 profit per month or $720 a year with very minimal work, so I think that income level is assured. Additionally, there will be some minor savings on food every month if she is home more often -- I would estimate about $30 per month or $360 per year.
I'd appreciate your advice on what to do in our situation. Would you recommend that she try out self-employment or continue to work at the library? Helping us look at the situation from your perspective would be invaluable.
Thank you