Good morning, friends! I’m keeping this intro brief today because it’s a summer weekend, and hopefully many of you readers have something fun planned! I am taking my estate-planning midterm, which is not fun but still needs to be done.
I hope you enjoy today’s paid edition of Home Economics! It’s our first from the state of Utah, and it features a stay-at-home mom and software engineer who are raising four kids. No surprise, they have one of the bigger grocery budgets we’ve seen.
Just a reminder that I’m looking for new entries to share. You can fill out the form here! (Also, I want to acknowledge a few people have reached out about making the form easier to use, and I am working on it! I hope to roll out an updated version soon!)
Age: 30
Location: Utah County, Utah
Relationship status: Married
Age of partner: 30
About me: I’m a CPA-turned-stay-at-home-mom of four kids seven and under, and I’m married to a software engineer. Our financial life has been a little crazy. For several years during and after the Covid pandemic, my husband made unheard-of-to-me amounts of money working for big tech companies. He recently accepted a lower-paying position (still plenty of money!) for a role that we are hopeful will be a little more humane.
We’ve always made a point to keep our day-to-day cost of living as low as possible, but we were able to check off some big purchases (including buying a new home and upgrading our cars) while we were still making big tech money. We are hopeful that in this new phase we will still be able to have moderate savings, although we haven’t put it to the test yet. I wanted to reach out because last I saw, you didn’t have any Utah submissions!
Income:
- Your job title/salary: I’m a stay-at-home mom, and I bring in maybe $1,000 a year from freelance clients I never dropped when I quit my “day job” as a CPA a few years ago.
- Partner’s job title/salary: Software engineer, $190,000. My husband’s job history has been a little crazy the past six years. After college, we moved to Florida for a job, and he was being paid well below market rate, but we didn’t really know he should have been earning more. His employer gave him a raise, but then shortly after, he was laid off. It was a blessing in disguise, because after he lost that job, he was recruited to a series of bigger and higher-paying roles at bigger and better tech companies. The money has been great, and it’s allowed us to do so many things, but the work has been stressful and unpredictable.
After the last layoff, we decided to take a beat to regroup before pursuing full-time jobs again, and we were lucky to have the savings to be able to do that. - Your monthly take-home pay (paycheck amount after taxes and other deductions): Almost always $0, but in December and January maybe $500 each month? And that is self-employment income, so it nets down significantly.
- Partner’s monthly take-home pay (paycheck amount after taxes and other deductions): For the last few months of job interviews, $0! We’re still waiting on the first paycheck from his new job. In the last job, it was just over $16,000 per month, but it will be significantly less going forward.
- Other: Until recently, we were renting our old home in Florida and made a small amount of rental income (around $500 a month after mortgage and expenses). The house is currently on the market.
- Total monthly income: Earlier this year, we decided to pull some money out of our brokerage account and use that to live on for the summer while we pursued a startup idea. Our budget philosophy in the interim has basically been “no big cuts, no big splurges.” I kind of feel like this is the whole point of saving lots and spending below our income. We bought ourselves some flexibility to be relaxed and not make major lifestyle changes while deciding on our next move.
