Lifestyle Changes to Start Homeschooling for Dual-income Households
- sstinson46
- May 25
- 9 min read
Updated: Jun 15
Homeschooling is a lifestyle and a full time job. It takes time and financial resources to be successful. Taking children to extracurricular activities, field trips, managing their education and meeting up with friends for socialization all take time, which is why it can be challenging to homeschool in a dual income household. However, due to the high cost of living in some areas, depending upon a single income to accommodate homeschooling can also be difficult.
If you're reading this blog post, you (or someone you know) is probably in a situation where:
Your child is having problems in a public school and the situation is getting worse.
You know that you have to do something, and homeschooling is an obvious answer.
You know that the solutions offered by the public school system will only create other more difficult long-term problems.
You can't homeschool, because you must have two incomes.
You can't homeschool because your stuck:
You need two incomes to live where you work.
This blog post is about how you can change this situation, so that you can homeschool. The changes that you're going to have to make may be challenging but will ultimately lead you towards a life where you're children grow up to believe in the Christian values that you hold, and where your child succeeds spiritually and emotionally, as well academically.
When your children leave home and enter the world as adults, you'll know that you made the right decision, even if doing so requires you to endure temporary hardship. More ultimately, you'll be able to stand before God and know in truth that you made the right choices in parenting your children, and you won't be ashamed.
"Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth." - 2 Timothy 2:15
Of course, inaction is easy, but can easily lead to these or other similar outcomes:
Your child ends up on prescription drugs, or becomes dependent upon social welfare programs, and/or psychologists and therapists.
Your child learns to hate you because you made a decision to send them to place that is harming them, which they will figure out when they become an adult.
Your child learns to hate you for everything that you believe in, because they were taught to do so in the public school system.
Your child becomes a life-long user of legal or illegal drugs, an emotionally damaged adult, or a criminal (or all of these!).
So let's get into the details about how to get to place where you can homeschool.
This is a two-part series. In the second part, we will discuss more specific and long-term plans.
Some of these tips may seem like sacrifices, but we believe that homeschooling benefit family and society so much, that these "sacrifices" are not really sacrifices at all.
Consider Moving to a Place with a Lower Cost of Living
Many of our family and public school peers were surprised when our family moved with a toddler, an infant and a dog to a rural area 3000 miles away. Our new home has a better commute and a large back yard. The home we purchased in a rural area has more square footage, so we can move around freely indoors during the cold winter months. It also was in an area with a lower cost of living which dramatically changed our take home pay making it easier to live on a single income. Our standard of living has improved drastically. Remember, its not how much you get paid that matters: its how much you keep.
Obviously, families move for other reasons. However, these things matter when you are preparing to homeschool.
Realistically, look at how much money you are spending to pay your mortgage or rent, as a percentage of the highest single income between both you and your spouse. If that amount is more than 40 to 50% of your single income take-home pay, you need to move elsewhere, where housing is less expensive, regardless of your circumstances. However, if you can get below 40% by selling your house or downsizing, that can work too.
The truth of the matter is that there are many places in America that simply cost a lot less to live in and these are better places than the urban areas. Sure, the job you or your spouse work at may not be as glamorous as the job you could get in silicon valley, but work is work wherever you go. The cost of living in say, Texas or Tennessee is half of what it costs to live in Silicon Valley, New York, San Fransisco, Los Angelos, or Seattle. By living in an expensive house or neighborhood (or both) with that huge mortgage (or worse, rent), you are putting yourself in an extremely insecure position, financially and spiritually.
That is, no one is indespensible in their job, and even the top performers can be let go at any time. We live in a globally unstable economy and if you are living paycheck to paycheck, you don't have any real security to begin with. If you or your spouse were let go today, would such a circumstance result in a financial emergency? If you're paying 40% to 50% of your take-home pay to a mortgage, it certainly would. More so, when you're living in this kind of circumstance, you are not able to make the right decisions at work. You have to make safe decisions, to protect your income, which mean losing out on long-term options that will benefit your career. When you are more financially independent, you can takes more risks and make better choices.
Selling your house and moving to a lower-costing area also will save you money in other areas, such as home owners insurance, maintenance, property taxes, HOA fees, utility bills, etc. The costs of these is huge and adds up over time. The money you spend on these excessive costs could have been a 20% down payment on a house in a couple years.
So create a concrete plan to move elsewhere with 3 to 6 months. Look at the cost of living in some prosepective places, even if it means changing careers somewhat. There are many businesses that are headquartered in the so-called "fly-over states", which may not pay as well as living in Seattle or San Francisco, but are far more secure. So many people in America are living outside of metropolitan areas: they are doing quite well.
Its not how much you get paid that matters:
its how much you keep that matters.
If you are locked in-place by debt, get out of debt and build an emergency savings fund. Start the Dave Ramsey Plan.
We highly recommend that you follow the Dave Ramsey financial plan. The plan will work to get you out of debt and become financially secure, if you are diligent in following it. And one of the early steps in that process is first establishing an emergency savings fund and then building it up to have 3 to 6 months of savings.
We took Dave Ramsey's class years ago and we highly recommend anyone take this class. It is especially beneficial to those who are getting out of debt, newlyweds, young adults and anyone who wants to improve their financial literacy.
The faster you build up your emergency savings, the faster you can get out of the high-cost tax-and-debt hell-hole that you're currently living in, which means you can homeschool on a single income. However, when you move to a new place that costs less to live in, you're going to need at least 3 to 6 months of savings to handle any rough patches you experience, so start saving today.
You're probably going to have to drastically cut your expenses to do this, especially if you want to do it fast enough so that you can start homeschooling. How soon do you need to move depends upon how serious your child's situation is. If your child is not in any serious trouble, maybe you can cut costs and save for 3-6 months until summer time (selling your house and moving, and finding a new job in the interim), before the next school year starts. If your child is already in a serious situation, you're going to have to take some serious cost-cutting measures.
Cut Costs Drastically in your life
To move and/or accommodate the costs associated with homeschooling
Let me clear about this: cutting costs is the best thing to do, both in the long term and the short term. Living minimally has some obvious benefits, both to yourself and your mental well-being and your family, regardless of whether you homeschool or not. Here are some examples.
Never Buy Food with Door-dash, Uber Eats, etc.
Eating at restaurants is expensive on it's own, however these services are a total rip-off. They cost 20% to 50% more than eating at a restaurant and substantially more than if you made food at home.
Make your own food.
Every pre-made food item at the grocery store will cost more than simply making it yourself. You'll end up saving hundreds of dollars a month by making meals for yourself and your family, which is not only healthier but will actually save you time. Every time that we make a crockpot meal, we (a family of 6) end up with leftovers and we save $10 to $20 on the food alone. The chicken tenders at the grocery store are basically the same ones at the drive through and there are many budget friendly, simple recipes to try for busy days as well.
If you have a car loan or a lease, unless you're close to paying it off, get rid of it.
Car loans are another scam. People ned up paying hundreds of more dollars per month when you could have bought a used car for 1/5 the price.
Stop buying the newest phone.
AT&T, Comcast, Apple, Samsung, and Google all want you to buy that $500 to $1000 phone every three years. Conversely, many cheap phones are only $50 to $100.
Cancel your Cable TV service.
Cable TV service forces you to pay for television networks that you don't watch and don't agree with. When you pay for cable TV service you're paying for cable networks, whether it is Fox News or CNN. Don't like the Democrat party? Too bad, because in paying for cable TV you are effectively donating somewhere between $5 to $10 per month towards their political allies at CNN, ABC, NBC, etc., and the same is true if you're a Democrat and don't like Fox News.
Get rid of your streaming services, except for one
In average, most Americans pay for 5 streaming services. This not only costs a lot of money, it also keeps you glued to your TV (we discuss this below).
Disconnect from the online lifestyle and live in real life.
Pursue a Vision of What Your Life Should be Like -- Living in Freedom
Many of us grew up in a world where there was no internet and we only watched TV for about 2 hours per day. We didn't have streaming services or social media and TV was only a distraction from real-life. These things steal our time from us today, and the result is that we are less creative, less adaptable and less flexible to make change, and less able to live freelying and independently.
Life was better before social media and streaming services. Sure, there were hardships -- but life was better because we had more freedom by having more time. People read books and talked about things more, in person. People engaged in real-life activities. We talked on the phone. When you're life is largely composed of endless scrolling and binge-watching on the streaming services, your life is being lost day-by-day, hour-by-hour, and minute-by-minute. And for what? When you spent the last 20 minutes scrolling, what did you gain from it, other than being drained of your emotional well-being, depolarized by the dopamine rushes that these social media sites design for?
When you disconnect from online services, the world will seem like a different place -- with more opportunities. You'll realize that there is a way to escape the rat-race, get out of debt and become successful. But that won't happen if you're spending all of your time on social media.
Read our article about social opportunities in the homeschool world.
You don't need a data plan that costs $120 to $180 a month. Shut it off.
Get a minimalist cell phone data plan, which can cost as little as $30 per month. By paying for these high-price data plans you're subsidizing a market that is working against you and your values. Get a plan from the small companies, which costs less.
You don't need a $120 a month cable TV service with all the channels. Shut it off.
In paying for cable TV, you are subsidizing all the terrible TV networks that you're spiritually and poltically opposed to, whether you watch Foxnews or ABC. And all of these TV networks now have online content that mirrors what is provided through cable TV. And when you pay for cable TV you're paying for all the news channels, regardless of whether you support them or not. Instead, get a simple low-cost internet only plan and 1 streaming service. You'll save somewhere between $40 to $100 a month.
Shut down the Amazon Flywheel (the online shopping habit). Turn off Prime.
Amazon Prime (and similar other services) are a scam -- they are 100% designed to get you buying more stuff from Amazon. Amazon itself has acknowledge that their business strategy is all about getting you to continuously buy things. Other online retailers are doing the same thing. In any case, you need to stop shopping online so much.
You'd be surprise how much money you spend on Amazon, or other online purchasing. Take a look at your credit card or checking account, add up the numbers, and you'll see you can probably save hundreds per month. The average consumer now spends $900 to $1800 a month on online-shopping.
Limit online subscriptions
According to this article, the average American pays $46 per month on video streaming services. Link This number is excessive and will dip into your homeschool lifestyle.
Read our article about how buying used DVDs is the new movie store experience.
Read our article for more tips on limiting screen time in an overly digital world.
Stay tuned for part 2, where we will construct a specific plan to start homeschooling.
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