Father’s Day
<thump, thump> Is this thing on? <thump> Testing, one two three…? Okay, um, well, as you can see, I am not your familiar Mammon Sense. This Sunday being Father’s Day, it seemed a good occasion to introduce myself. I’m Grandad Sense.
Mammon Sense concluded her Feb 21, 2022 entry, “The Stay At Home Husband,” with these words: “Several people have expressed their surprise to me that I’m so pleased to have my husband stay home while I’m employed. This is still relatively uncommon, though it seems normal to me. My father was a stay at home parent, and when Mr. Sense and I planned out our future, the choice was clear for us. Why did we do this? Is it biblically acceptable? Do I submit to my husband, or my boss? Stay tuned for a future post on the ups and downs of being a stay at home dad, with input from both my husband and father!”
If the stay-at-home-husband status of my son-in-law is “still relatively uncommon”, my own back in the day was downright eccentric. How did it come about?
When little Mammon was still just a gleam in her mother’s eye, indeed before Grandma Sense and I were even married, we had a conversation about kids. It went something like,
Her: I want kids.
Me: That’s fine, but somebody is going to stay home with them.
By “somebody” it was understood I meant an actual parent, i.e., one or the other of us. During my own childhood I recognized the connection between parental oversight and the behavior of my peers. In the late 1960s-early 1970s, both parents working was the relative rarity in the middle class neighborhood where I grew up. But it happened, and if you wanted mischief after school you went home with the kid who had just a maid, babysitter or older sister left in charge.
By the time I graduated college in 1980, the high water mark of the YUPPIE (young urban professional) culture was upon us. For reasons economic, philosophical, political and more, many Yuppies subcontracted out the raising of their children. “Daycare” became a thing. Those who could afford it launched the au pair phenomenon. Those who couldn’t coaxed grandparents out of retirement and into nannyhood.
I wanted my own family life to include a stay-at-home parent. Although Grandma Sense and I didn’t immediately discuss which “somebody” it would be, common practice would have made us assume that she was the likely candidate. But life takes funny turns…
Grandma Sense and I were married for seven years before we decided to expand the family. Seven years in a mode of Yuppie inception known as DINKS—‘Dual Income, No Kids.’ That gave us a big financial leg up on young parents who spawn straightaway after college. We lived well, but we didn’t blow through ‘stupid money’ on cars, expensive clothes, exotic vacations. Without any sacrifice to speak of, responsible DINKS could basically get along on just one income and bank the other. We were able to save for a nice down payment on our first house, which in turn lowered our mortgage payments and set us up for further saving down the road.
I worked in computers, initially at a NASA research facility (great first job out of college!) and then, not long after we got married, for a defense contractor in the Washington DC area. Grandma Sense was an economist who started out at electrical utilities but then landed a government job with a federal banking regulator. Our careers both progressed nicely. However, as the biological clock ticked along, a lot of work travel, plus a certain disillusionment with the sausage factory that is defense contracting, infected me with a case of Yuppie Flu—what Newsweek magazine disparagingly termed “a fashionable form of hypochondria” more commonly known as burnout. For a time I considered becoming a schoolteacher. But then a different calculation came to the fore.
We’d bought a cute vintage house in a nice neighborhood. One of its interesting features was that the second floor was completely unfinished. Not an attic—it was a full-blown second story, but you’d walk up the stairs into just a big open space across the entire house. No walls, no doors. Downstairs was more than adequate for just the two of us, and we lived there several years. But we always had the idea that kids would happen in concert with “finishing off“ the upstairs to add a couple more bedrooms and a bath.
We solicited proposals and bids from architects and builders, and—yowza! The cost was going to be an order of magnitude greater than anything we’d imagined. Prepping our dream house for kids might have consumed more than a year’s worth of one of our salaries.
We couldn’t argue the numbers. We’d had in multiple contractors and the bids were what they were. But I also couldn’t understand why it should be so much! Anyway, after what probably an especially hard day at work, I uttered words to the effect of: Maybe I should just quit my job and build it myself. Then I can be the one to stay home with the kids.
Admittedly, I had no idea what I was getting myself into on either the construction or child-rearing front. But fortified by a supportive wife and a naïve faith that I could do anything if I put my mind to it (“hanging drywall—how tough could it be?”), off we went.
So much for the back-story, let’s reconnect with the spirit of this blog. My plan elicited two sorts of reaction from co-workers and friends: “You’re kidding?!” and “I wish I could do that!”
If you’re interested in FIRE and following this blog, you probably don’t relate to “You’re kidding?” Elsewhere Mammon Sense describes the goal of FIRE as being to be to “grow your investment accounts enough to free yourself from the need for paid employment.” Fine, but while some people work for a living, others live for working. “You’re kidding?” expressed the fact that many men derive their sense of self worth from their jobs. Two guys meeting for the first time are likely to accompany the introductory handshake not with “What church do you attend?” or “How many kids do you have?” but, rather, “What do you do?” If the reply is “I raise my kids and work on my house,” there might follow a frozen smile and a searching look as they scan my face for a sign that I was only joking. Not finding one, they’re at a loss for a follow-up.
“I wish I could do that!” is a different matter, the spirit of FIRE. People who reacted this way may have felt some dissatisfaction with their own jobs or the career paths they’d found themselves on. But they couldn’t see an alternative. I think in a lot of cases, the abundant disposable income of their DINK years had accustomed them to a certain lifestyle. Maintaining it after kids would be difficult in any case, and impossible if half of the couple simply stopped earning money.
But as Mammon Sense has also pointed out, the calculation is not that simple. There are alternative costs for not having one parent stay home. These include hard-to-quantify things like better after-school oversight, but also the more quantifiable real value of your time. Again quoting from the “The Stay at Home Husband”: “Having one parent at home is within reach for more families than most people think. It’s all about tradeoffs. If you and your spouse are both working, it may be that one of you can already retire, forever, with less impact on your finances than you think. … Mr. Sense and I decided we weren’t willing to trade eight hours of his time per day for the money we could reasonably expect him to make from full time employment. Could we have used tens of thousands more dollars per year? Well, of course– couldn’t you? But this choice has led to incredible benefits for … everything childcare entails. We could pay someone else to do this job, but the costs would easily eat up most of the extra income we’d have from Mr. Sense’s job. Having Mr. Sense at home allows us the flexibility to make choices that are best for our family.”
Grandma Sense being the economist, she carefully projected our budget before I quit my job. There was no such thing as FIRE back then, but we sort of anticipated it. Where we’d previously monitored our spending in a general way, now we paid attention to every penny. Unnecessary DINK expenses like maid service and restaurants were mostly eliminated. One important factor in making the numbers add up in our case was that a spouse quitting work to stay home with kids qualified as a life event for which Grandma Sense could adjust her federal benefits package, adding me to the health insurance plan.
I must admit that in the first months under the new regime I became painfully aware of how carelessly I’d frittered away money during the preceding years. It had been so easy throw a few dollars at little stuff rather than spending just a few minutes of precious ‘free time’ doing things myself. But the small savings do add up. Amazingly, between our rescaled lifestyle, a favorable economy, and a nice promotion that Grandma Sense achieved, within a couple years we were back to a savings rate almost equal to what we had when we were both working.
