The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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I'm not sure I can say much about your career beyond "#1 is the 'success story' I hear most often."
Given the discussion of children I assume you have a spouse. Are they employed? If not, why private school? Why not homeschool? If you and your spouse are both employed, the price tag of private school for multiple children could rapidly outstrip the kind of salary it sounds like you're drawing. That means it would be cheaper for you to quit and homeschool your children--to say nothing of the savings in other areas, like transportation, wardrobe, food preparation, etc. Homemakers (who take their task seriously) represent household economic value measuring well into six figures easily, particularly if you've got more than 2 or 3 children you want to keep out of the public school system.
It would also be useful to know (roughly) where you live and to what extent you're willing to relocate. What's the price of moving to a really good neighborhood with exemplary public schools? Have you looked into charter schools, or Arizona's recent voucher expansion?
If you're living in, like, London and you've hand-picked some insanely amazing private school, but you're having trouble finding a way to pay for it, my advice would probably be more along the lines of "you need to lower your expectations and learn to live within your means." Finding a way to earn more money is not your only option; finding a way to live with less is also something you should consider. But if you're living in urban Denver and just can't imagine sending your children to your awful neighborhood school, you actually have a ton of options (especially if you're willing and able to relocate) that don't require you to dramatically increase your salary in a short period of time.
my wife doesn't work, but wants to go back when kids are a bit older and that will alleviate the money problem to some degree. Homeschooling might be the default choice if we can't make the budget work otherwise. perhaps, i gave too much circumstantial detail. What i am trying to get at is I'm looking for a way to kickstart my earning potential, but can't crater it in the short term to do so, and i'm not hung up on a lot of other "job satisfaction" criteria beyond balancing family life.
I'm willing to do extra work, but want to find a strategy that will pay off well.
My big fear with #1 above is that even if I find a modest improvement that I may have hit a plateau or ceiling and digging in will only lose more time as I'm already mid 30s. As far as I can tell, it will be a long time with no guarantees to hit director level title/salaries internally, and externally I'm not competitive enough to up-jump levels.
On the other end of the spectrum, my fear with #4 is that I'm too old and established to make a major restart even if its at the bottom of a more lucrative ladder.
Im most curious about folks here in software dev roles' thoughts. especially if you got into it later
#2 and #3 are somewhere in between, strategies that might set me back temporarily, but with the goal of kickstarting momentum in hopes of reaching escape velocity in my current track. The big risk here is that I waste a lot of slack adn resources in the near term only to not succeed or blow up on the launchpad.
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Any sources for this? I haven't seen that claim before and I'm curious to see how you would get to that number.
Just math and life experience, really. Private school tuition is ~$12,000 annually in the U.S., though it can be a lot more--up to $60,000 annually. Two kids in a top tier private school and your homemaker is already clocking in over six figures. Four kids at an average-priced private school puts us at a homeschool value of $48,000 annually.
The average commercially-prepared meal costs about $13. A nutritious meal for a family of four is easily prepared at home for $20 plus prep time, and with skill, knowledge, and appropriate tools can be prepared for half that without much difficulty. Easy-prep meals are cheaper than commercially-prepared food, but more expensive than cooking from scratch. Very few people eat out every meal, so it's difficult to quantify the benefits precisely (and one of the benefits is often improved health, which reduces health care costs in the long term), but very conservatively, a homemaker should easily bring your food budget down $5,200 per year (assuming a $100/week savings) and potentially brings your food budget down much more:
Assume $25 food per person per day for a family of four: $36,500
Assume $5 food per person per day for a family of four: $7,300
Savings of $29,200 per year
Add two more children, and the savings from homemaking could get much higher, but if we assume even a low figure of $10,000, between private school tuition and food preparation, the hypothetical homemaker with four children is already saving the family $58,000 annually--in post-tax dollars, so in terms of salary comparison we're already over $60,000.
Ah, whoops. I forgot about after-school care! I'm assuming all four children are old enough to be enrolled in school, so I'm not including daycare costs (which are not low), but with two working parents, four children in after-school care will run you $600/week easy, or more like $2000/week for Nanny-level care. Assuming 36 weeks of school (I think that number is actually higher in many places), that's a minimum of $21,600 annually for after-school care for four children. A conscientious homemaker does better-than-Nanny level care, clocking in at an eye-popping $72,000 annually, but let's just use the lowball number.
For four children in an average American household, a homemaker would already need to be earning more than $79,600 post-tax--just to cover the stuff they can no longer do when they are employed. This might not sound like much to someone who is accustomed to working in San Francisco or Manhattan for $300,000+ per year, but don't lose sight of the fact that the median American worker earns less than $40,000 per year. And in terms of quality, compared against expensive private schooling, commercial meals, and professional nannying, the "fair market value" of conscientious homemaking is already well into the hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.
Past this point, individual circumstances matter a lot. A two-parent family with a homemaker can more easily get by with a single vehicle, for example, though where one lives will influence this possibility substantially. A homemaker doesn't need a work wardrobe, though more expensive work wardrobes typically come with higher-paying jobs, so perhaps this is a wash. And there are a number of non-economic benefits as well, whether those be improved academic achievement, greater emotional connection to your children, or just not having to answer to an employer.
For someone who hates kids or can't grasp their own self worth without a corporate stamp of approval, all of this is obviously moot. But in terms of dollars-and-cents, one would need to be at minimum a rather above-average earner before a salary could outpace the monetary value of conscientious homemaking.
Yeah, and OP made it a bit clearer in another comment that the point of the post is strictly to solicit career-trajectory advice, rather than to examine plans pertaining to spouse and children, so this is all rendered somewhat tangential anyway. Ah, well.
Some states do have private school vouchers of various kinds, there are also tax rebates and of course many private schools offer scholarships. It's difficult to commensurate costs and benefits in the realm of child-raising for many reasons (not that this stops anyone, including me, from trying), but one that I think COVID-driven remote work expansions really highlighted was the possibility of spending more on a house in a good school district, to spend less on private schooling. If you've only got an average number of children, this likely represents only a small savings, but if you have 4+ children (OP seems to have some children and specifies wanting "more") the savings can stack up quickly--even at only $10k/year.
This also kind of overlooks the fact that the "private school advantage" is much more legible in the UK than in the US. There are some good private K-12 schools in the US for sure, but usually when I see stark opportunity or income gaps being discussed in the literature, it's UK schools under examination. In the US, private and public charter academies vary in quality as much as, and arguably even more than, neighborhood and public magnet schools. I admit that--while there are no doubt many good counterexamples!--I personally view suburban $10k private schools as kind of weird; they don't generally appear to outperform suburban neighborhood schools (the way urban private schools are almost always superior to nearby public alternatives), so it's hard for me to see suburban private schools in the US as anything but opportunities for the middle and upper-middle classes to participate in a cargo cult of pretend-wealth.
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This article suggests a sum of 180 k$/a. I think this topic was in the news a few years ago because it was "just another example of how women are being shortchanged".
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