I am a certified teacher but I currently (past 7 years) work as a teaching assistant and I LOVE IT!! The pay is not great, but the hours can’t be beat, I am a union employee, I get excellent health benefits, AND I have a pension program! After I had kids I realized teaching really wasn’t the career for me for many reasons stated above, but I do like working in the school and have school hours, school breaks off and summer vacation off. If you can live on less, I highly recommend it.a

Totally agree. My husband calls Comcast and says, “cancel service.” That’s how you get the loyalty department and they will miraculously come up with a MUCH better deal for you. You just have to keep track of when the contract ends so that you remember to call up again and nickel and dime with them so your bill doesn’t go up. There’s ALWAYS a better deal. You just have to spend time on the phone with them which is very annoying.

I call Comcast every year to argue with them. It drives me nuts they give better deals to new customers than old ones! It usually takes at least 2-3 refusals of their offers before I find something that keeps it in what I deem as sufficiently reasonable (~$50 price point). Right now we have 60 mps, which isn’t the best price we’ve had. The best deal I got was when I had lost my job and called to cancel it – they knew I was serious and offered $30 but I needed to agree to a 1 yr contract (foolishly did not lock in the 2 year contract). We’ve contemplated switching back and forth with FIOS & Comcast to get better deals, and we’ve also heard of people that will switch the account between spouses to get the introductory deals.

Also note that this tax deduction is a limited time – it is currently only available until 2021 (2017-2021). As it’s unknown whether this tax benefit will be kept beyond that date, I would suggest that it is worthwhile to continue funding the 529 and taking advantage of this deduction at this point.

I should also add that “low income”for a family of 4 for our area is freaking $72,000/yr!

Frenchmama, where do you live where you have to annotate lessons and have them written out??? I’m in Washington, and we don’t have to do that. All our curriculum (elementary) is largely aligned with the standards already, though we do have to fill in some gaps. Not sure if other areas do this, but we get an hour and a half early release every Friday for professional development or planning, depending on the week.
Also, Washington state funds the bulk of everyone’s salaries, so the variation between districts in pay is only a few thousand dollars a year. We are all on basically the same pay scale, so science and math teachers make the same as everyone else. For reference, (because I hate when people won’t talk about salaries) I have a masters and 3 years experience, and I’m making about $70K/yr. My husband has 10 yrs, a masters, and is making about $90K in a different district. He teaches science, but doesn’t get any bonus for that.

Hey Mary, As Susan and Thia have mentioned, with changes to legislation, it’s simply not the case that teaching is family-friendly in most districts for most teachers because of the heavy burden of tracking and reporting required for each student, plus the relatively recent phenomenon of parents wanting up-to-the minute info via internet/email/etc about their kids. Additionally, with school districts typically cutting budgets more and more, the aides and other professionals who used to take charge of monitoring halls and recess and school pickup/dropoff often have been cut, requiring teachers to take on these additional duties.

Every teacher I student-taught with came in on the weekends to do extra grading or did so from home, many from 5am-10am or late at night. Once you add in the expectation for junior teachers to pick up extra coaching duties because they are lower on the totem pole and often having “last pick” of the subjects and grades they will teach, it is a job that will have you working 50-70 hour weeks, minimum, for the first 2-5 years just to get the work done and this is even more true for a more subjective subject like English! You also have to be present at school for set amounts of time before and after lessons are done for constant availability to meet with students and parents, so you don’t get to arrive and leave with the school bell (which is what used to make teaching family-friendly once your children were all in school).

For example, take grading: English teachers (like I was!), for a writing task, will spend between 5-15 mins reading through every essay assignment and giving a grade. Often, said grade must have a “rubric” to explain and justify the grade on a scale of points–not a bad thing and it holds us to higher standards, but it is another addition to the grading mountain. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Your curriculum: you’ll be making changes every single year, not just to improve what could be better but to meet major changes to curriculum standards that many/most states have adopted. You need to hand in your lesson plans weeks in advance. Gone are the days when you could write a few notes to yourself about what you’ll be doing for the week once you have a few years’ teaching under your belt and “know” your lessons. All lessons must be written out and annotated, listing the state curriculum requirements that each meets. For your IEP students, you have to fill out daily, weekly, and/or monthly reports on how they are doing, plus how you are meeting each of their individualized education plans with adjustments to each lesson. Even subjects whose lesson plans used to be rather “set it and forget it”, like math and hard sciences, have seen sweeping changes in what methods must be taught, adding mountains to what they have to do!

That said, if you must teach, do teach math or science if you have the capability (and desire) and are certified. Math and science teachers are in high demand and often make the highest salaries in the district because they are the most difficult to find. You can also usually find a job in any district you choose, whereas language, history, PE, arts, and music teachers have to often take jobs where they can get them, sometimes a long commute from where they actually live, or travel around to multiple schools in the district (foreign langauge, arts, music, and PE…) to get a full day’s work in because of budget cuts.

These are the factors that led me to leave teaching. And I loved teaching! I just had to admit that, in its current state, it didn’t love me back. But, like I said previously, go into the classrooms, observe what’s going on in your preferred subject’s classrooms, and ask teachers in your preferred subject matter what it’s like in their district to be a teacher.

My husband works full time, makes a decent amount more than I do, and loves his job, so we think he should be the person to work full time. I also like the domestic tasks more and already yearn to be home more than I’m able to right now-I’m sure this will only increase as we have kids! I’m hoping my current job will let me know 2-3 days a week (I work at a renewable energy company that does industrial scale wind and solar projects) but I’m not sure there will be a position that would allow this. If not, I work for a local tutoring company on the side and I’m hoping I can take more hours there. I’ve also thought about Airbnb because we own our home and live close to a lot of attractions near the city. And now I have some other possibilities to add to my list!

One that especially interested me was nannying. Does anyone have experience with working as a nanny and caring for another child at home along with their own child? Are there any cons that you’ve experienced with this? It seems like a great way to earn some income while avoiding the costs of daycare and staying home with your child.

Last thing I’ll say-waiting tables is one my favorite job I’ve ever had. If you find the right group of people and the right restaurant, it can be so fun and you can make a decent amount of money. I’ve worked at two, and liked one a lot more than the other. The size of the restaurant made a big difference for me. At the smaller restaurant, we needed less staff and we ended up making more money because we got more tables per person. I became good friends with a lot of my coworkers and still keep in touch to this day. My legs also weren’t killing me from walking so much at the end of my shift. The restaurant that I didn’t like as much was huge and had a lot more servers to cover the large restaurant. We had to walk so much more over the course of the night. One of my coworkers once wore a pedometer and tracked that he had walked 13 miles in one shift. Granted, it was our busiest night and he had the farthest tables on our patio, but still. It also had a much less personal feel because of having so many staff members. One thing I would say is key is to work at a busy restaurant if you want to make a decent amount of money. Both restaurants I worked at were very popular. But I always found it interesting that I made more money at the smaller restaurant. And lastly, both were local restaurants and didn’t have as many corporate rules. I know not everyone might have busy, local restaurants where they live. If you do though, they are a great option!

My son in 2.5 and your story feels familiar to me, as it seems to for many a mama here. I am adjunct faculty and was recently offered the opportunity to get on the full-time tenure track that I always wanted. So of course I said no. I have found that I cannot be comfortable in my skin when I am away from my boy at a full-time job. And so I will stay very part-time and my husband, who work in parks maintenance, will be our breadwinner.

From everything you wrote, it feels like you have a similar call in your heart. Some moms are built to work full-time away from the home (most of my friends happily say that they would much rather work than be at home with the kids), and some are not. I’m not, and it’s more than okay if you aren’t either (I mention it because I get a lot of strong negative reactions to my choice to be primarily at home).

If your husband is interested in getting a traditional job, then I would suggest you follow your instincts and find some part-time work that allows you to be home with your daughter as much as your feel is appropriate. (As a former freelancer, I totally get his desire to be done with the hustle that demands time that would be more joyfully spent creating.)

It may not be totally in line with your agricultural dreams, but one idea is local parks departments or specialty gardens. My husband works for a parks department in Washington state and they have extra-hire positions almost year-round. The pay is middling, but for people who love to be outside and work in a natural setting, it’s a great choice that can be quite flexible. In our area we also have a number of private/public partnership gardens that use part-time help, and something like that might be a good fit for you.

Someone else already mentioned it, but http://www.readingmytealeaves.com is a great place to learn about living with kids in a teeny tiny space. I’ve not done it myself, but Erin makes it look doable.

I would definitely dig into various tv-like streaming options if you haven’t looked recently. I know that directv, playstation, and sling all have some sports channels. You have to watch the subscription+internet costs, but it might result in savings.

Sports was definitely a challenge for us when we looked into going without cable. My boyfriend is an alumn of a west-cost state school, and is really into watching all the sports (seriously, football, basketball (mens and womens), softball, track, etc., etc., etc.). We live on the east coast though, so even with cable, we had a hard time getting the games we wanted to watch. For a while we just “borrowed” his grandma’s west-coast cable log in for games, but the streaming options got better so now we use one of those.

My boyfriend helped his parents, who live in the mountain-west region, set up tv-like streaming too. They ended up going with a different streaming service from us because the “channels” offered in their state were different from the ones we can get where we live (I imagine that this is due to various exclusivity deals that the channels have with cable providers).