Author Topic: Stay at home Dad?  (Read 4441 times)

COMO

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Stay at home Dad?
« on: September 01, 2013, 08:47:48 AM »
My wife and I are talking about having our first and probably only child. The more we talk the more we come back to the idea of me staying home. My wife loves her job gets 5 weeks vacation, and makes better money then I do.  If we do this our thoughts are to sell our home and buy a house in a more desirable part of town to remodel. I am almost done with our current home. I was thinking I would try to buy and remodel 2 homes by the time the kid started school.Then settle in to a long term home and head back to the work force once school starts. Am I right in the fact that we wont get hit with taxes as long as the home is our pepersonal residence for at least 2 years?  Would this be an ok plan (make sense)? I should say my love has always been carpentry and woodworking. Also the area of town weare looking is also where we would like to settle so even if we get stuck in a home we are not terribly hurt.

arebelspy

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Re: Stay at home Dad?
« Reply #1 on: September 01, 2013, 08:52:09 AM »
Am I right in the fact that we wont get hit with taxes as long as the home is our pepersonal residence for at least 2 years? 

You can exclude up to $500k (as a married couple, 250k single) of capital gains on a primary residence as long as you've lived there at least two years, yes.

This is a strategy some people use.  Sounds like it may be beneficial in your case.

Plus, free labor!



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zhelud

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Re: Stay at home Dad?
« Reply #2 on: September 01, 2013, 11:15:12 AM »
Before you actually have kids, it is very easy to over-estimate the amount of stuff you can get done while caring for a child full-time.  You may be able to remodel 2 houses- but I suggest not pouring too much money into such a plan before you figure out how much time you will be spending on child care.

Johnny Aloha

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Re: Stay at home Dad?
« Reply #3 on: September 01, 2013, 12:54:55 PM »
Before you actually have kids, it is very easy to over-estimate the amount of stuff you can get done while caring for a child full-time. 

This puts a huge smile on my face!  My wife didn't go back to work after our first kid.  The baby is 8 months old now.  Before a child, we talked about how much time she would have as a stay at home mom and what kind of businesses she should start, what kind of e-books she should write, etc. 

What a joke!  It's funny how naive we were.

Being a stay at home parent is pretty much an all consuming job (at least for us).  Even with a large group of friends with similar age children and lots of play dates, it's not easy. 

I applaud your thinking, but recommend you lower your expectations on how much renovation work can be done in a day.  We're in the middle of another project and I plan out the day around naptime so that using the table saw / circular saw / nailgun / whatever won't wake up the baby.  Might not be an issue if you have a large house that is well soundproofed though!

My simple project is 2 months over original schedule.  Luckily I'm not in a rush!

Congrats on the baby, by the way!

cats

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Re: Stay at home Dad?
« Reply #4 on: September 01, 2013, 04:08:25 PM »
We're thinking about going this route, so please post back with updates if you do go through with it!  Our timeline is more that we will likely both continue to work traditional full-time jobs until the kids are school age (financially we both earn enough that having one parent stay home from the get-go would not make financial sense, and my employer has on-site daycare, so if we can get lucky on the lottery with that we should be good to go for a few years), but once they are in school my partner would like to be able to quit his full-time job and start remodeling a fixer-upper (he does have some experience already in this arena, so I'm confident he would be able to do it) while also having a more flexible schedule to accommodate after school pick-ups, activities, etc.  I would hopefully then "retire" to something more part-time a few years after that.

Like some others have cautioned, we're anticipating that the pace of any work he does will likely be very slow.  My mother stayed home full-time and I saw how hard it was for her to get any kind of long-term projects completed, because there were so many competing demands on her time.  In our case, our timeline is such that by the time he would be quitting his full-time career, we would have hit our minimum FI target, and my income is enough to cover all of our basic living expenses, so there would not be a lot of pressure for his efforts to yield an immediate profit, as long as he wasn't losing a bunch of money!

COMO

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Re: Stay at home Dad?
« Reply #5 on: September 01, 2013, 05:49:22 PM »
Yeah I am probably being pretty ambitious.  The majority of my work would probably occur on my DW days off.  She only works 3-4 days a week.  I have currently remodeled a repo while working a full time and a part time job.  That being said I don't anticipate getting much done in the evenings because of noise and sleep schedule.  Also I was wondering the legality of the following.  In the area I am looking they currently allow garage apartments to be built if the lot is big enough to accommodate.  Assuming all the i's are dotted and t's are crossed i thought about buying a place to build and apartment on in the back.  Then allowing us to live there during the major projects such as kitchens and bathroom remodels.  When done we could either rent the apartment or use it for visiting people.  The houses are close to the college.  I figure the mother in law sweet or rental would increase property value and maybe keep us sane through the major renovation.  Does this make sense.  Would I have legal problems with the 2 year rule.  Thanks for all the info.  We are currently a ways off but I have started looking at properties. 
Thanks again