Author Topic: Affording home school?  (Read 3090 times)

meerkat

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Affording home school?
« on: September 05, 2019, 07:19:50 AM »
Hi all. We're not too serious about home school yet and I feel like we've got some time since our child is only four, but I was wondering what finances look like for families that do home schooling? In our case we spend about 60% of our take home pay with two working parents. Having one parent stay at home would mean having to pay more for health insurance (hooray U.S. healthcare) so the day care savings isn't quite as nice as one would hope.

This is mostly an idle question/day dreaming at this point, but it got me curious. What does it look like for other families? Do you manage to save money still or are you choosing to break even because you feel that homeschooling is valuable enough?

LiveLean

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Re: Affording home school?
« Reply #1 on: September 05, 2019, 03:08:08 PM »
Oh boy. Any homeschooling topic is like tossing a piece of raw meat in here. Let's try to stay on your specific angle of the topic.

If the parent staying at work has employee-sponsored health insurance to cover the family, then your health insurance costs should not change.

Homeschooling isn't really relevant to the financial discussion since you're becoming a stay-at-home parent and removing one of two incomes. Whether that time is spent homeschooling or being a traditional stay-at-home parent, the financial challenge of living on one income is the same.





Khaetra

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Re: Affording home school?
« Reply #2 on: September 05, 2019, 03:52:54 PM »
Whether that time is spent homeschooling or being a traditional stay-at-home parent, the financial challenge of living on one income is the same.

This and can you actually afford to have one of you stay home?

Knapptyme

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Re: Affording home school?
« Reply #3 on: September 05, 2019, 04:06:33 PM »
We chose this route. I'll put a brief list together, but realize there may be others depending on your situation. We're entering year 3 of our decision. I was previously employed as a high school teacher, so I wasn't bringing in six figures. (Note: my wife is also a teacher.)

1. I love my kids, and I'm not the kind of adult that needs to get away from or take a break from them (even though it's nice sometimes.)

2. Health insurance - this is a YMMV category for everyone. With the loss of my income/job, the size of our family (already 2 kids, now 3), and the relatively low income of my wife, our kids qualified for Medicaid. Yes, people may look at this as wrong or abusing the system. For anyone interested in how this works on our end, PM me. Otherwise, chill out. (Note: I'm not covered by Medicaid, so it's self insurance for me for various reasons.)

3. Homeschooling has costs. Mostly, this comes in the forms of what you make of it. Homeschool share programs can cost some money. Curriculum can cost some money. Testing can cost money. Some of that you can or should be able to outsource to your local school system if necessary, i.e. testing, speech therapy, or some other specific need.

4. Being a SAHP does not mean no more income. I can do random things at home to make or save money during each school day and still have time to homeschool my kids ages 7, 4, and 6 months. Sometimes it becomes a homeshool lesson and accomplishes a 2-for-1.

5. No more 401(k) or 403(b) max contributions. Unless I set up some kind of SEP, I'm missing out on those tax free earnings. Oh well.

gatortator

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Re: Affording home school?
« Reply #4 on: September 05, 2019, 08:47:03 PM »
Whether that time is spent homeschooling or being a traditional stay-at-home parent, the financial challenge of living on one income is the same.

This and can you actually afford to have one of you stay home?

yes,  this.  I think you are really asking -- can I become a stay at home parent?

When you drop to one income and one person stays home:  day care costs drop,  transportation costs drop, eating out budget drops,  clothing budget drops,  and also TAXES drop (you may drop a tax bracket) and you may become eligible for tax deductions/credits for which you previously did not qualify.

utilities go up  (water, electricity, gas) since you are home during the day,  insurance can go up depending on how it was handled before and whether you had any life insurance coverage.

...

As to how we did it---  we bought a house where the total mortgage was no more than 3x the income of the lowest wage earner.  The payment remained affordable regardless of who was working.  We paid cash for our vehicles.  Those two things covered our biggest fixed expenses.  Everything else was adjusted as we no longer needed to pay for convenience (ie housekeeper, eating out, lots of gas to drive everywhere).

once everything was adjusted, our savings rate remained the same for 1 income as it did for 2  (shows how much convenience we had built into our lives).
« Last Edit: September 05, 2019, 08:51:05 PM by gatortator »

TrudgingAlong

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Re: Affording home school?
« Reply #5 on: September 06, 2019, 09:23:14 AM »
Uh, yeah, affording to homeschool is really more a question of can you afford to live on one income? Answer that, and you have your answer. No, I don’t believe homeschooling is more important than going into debt and losing health insurance. I say this as someone who homeschooled for five years and now has their kids back in public because we finally live in an area with really good schools.

We were a single income household long before homeschooling. Definitely focus on how you will make that work before committing. Unless you live in an area with absolutely terrible schools, not being able to homeschool is not the disaster not having health insurance, for example, would be for the family.

meerkat

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Re: Affording home school?
« Reply #6 on: September 06, 2019, 09:40:50 AM »
Thanks everyone. Homeschool = SAHP is kind of what I was expecting. I figured school expenses would kind of be a wash too since school supplies and requests for fundraisers would just be reallocated to buying curriculum, I just didn't know if there were any other surprises in store. In theory we could lower our grocery costs a bit by having the flexibility to shop around at different stores for deals, but we already cut cable and all the other easy low hanging fruit. Thankfully schools around here are decent, anything they miss we might be able to incorporate as bonus reading or something for a reward and general conversational topics around the house or vacations.

shelivesthedream

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Re: Affording home school?
« Reply #7 on: September 06, 2019, 11:02:12 AM »
The two main factors, IMO, are whether you can afford to lose one income, and what kind of homeschooling you're planning. If you're planning to do school-at-home, there will be significant costs in terms of boxed curriculum and supplies. Less so if you're planning to do DIY unit studies based on library books and the internet...but more so if you're planning a lot of field trips. You can spend thousands a year or you can do it for free, and there are umpteen variations in the middle which involve different levels of cost and different kinds of parental effort. You don't have to commit to some grand homeschooling philosophy before you even start, but the school-at-home vs DIY thing is something to consider.

A small cost that you may want to consider is the cost of actually being at home all day. For example, having to heat the home during the hours when you would all usually be out.

LifeHappens

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Re: Affording home school?
« Reply #8 on: September 06, 2019, 11:11:34 AM »
You might want to check out mongoose's journal. She is homeschooling two kids while working on their own startup. For a while she also had a part-time job out of the home.

cats

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Re: Affording home school?
« Reply #9 on: September 09, 2019, 09:58:38 AM »
Agreed, it seems the big financial question is whether or not you can afford to go down to one income.

I do know a woman who has recently started homeschooling her teenager while continuing to work FT.  I am not sure if she has negotiated a more flexible schedule or additional WFH permissions.  Her husband works FT also.  I am quite interested in seeing how that is going to work out.  I know a teenager is probably capable of a lot of self-instruction, and it seems from the few other people I know who homeschool that it's quite common to rely on online curriculum and lessons so perhaps there isn't a huge onus on the parent to develop that (and they are planning to hire a tutor to help her with math, as apparently that is a weak area for both of them), but it still seems a bit crazy that two parents working FT could also homeschool effectively.

Another woman I know from HS homeschools her kids and she and her husband run their own business (a retail store).  So she does work (I believe she keeps the books and makes a lot of decisions about inventory), but also has a lot of flexibility in her schedule.

Michael in ABQ

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Re: Affording home school?
« Reply #10 on: September 10, 2019, 08:25:44 PM »
My wife has been a stay at home mom for almost the entire time we've been married. She homeschooled our oldest three for about 4-5 years before we finally decided to enroll them in a private catholic school with a classical curriculum. Once number six came along it was just too hard to take care of a baby, a toddler, and try to homeschool four older kids. The private school is about $12k a year (fourth child is free) so that's a significant addition to our budget. Homeschool expenses were less than $1,000 a year between curriculum, books, supplies, etc.

We decided early on that we would be a single-income household. Our savings rate is relatively low, probably around 10-15% at most, and for many years was more like 5-10%. We still rent and paid cash for our two vehicles, both of which are over 15 years old. It helps that my income has gone up from around $45k to about $85k in the last five years. With the nee tax bill we also come out much further ahead. $12,000 in child tax credits more than wipes out all of our federal income tax liability and offsets most of our state and payroll taxes.