Jessica at Life As Mom has a great post up on living on one income and living well. Here’s a snippet:
Fifty years ago it was commonplace for just one parent (usually dad) to work. One income was sufficient to pay the family’s bill. Today, there might be a number of reasons why a family would be living on one income.
- Mom or Dad might be laid off from work or unable to find a job.
- Mom or Dad might need to leave the workplace for health reasons.
- Mom or Dad might decide to stay home to care for the children or an aging parent.
- One parent might be in school or other vocational training.
- There might only be one parent in the family. Single parenting is a tough job, not to mention it’s difficult economically.
- You don’t want to rely on two incomes in case of health or economy-related issues arise in the future.
While our family currently earns two incomes, we try as best we can to make it living on one income, mainly because of reason #6. If one of us became unable to work or the economy took a major dive (again), we’d like to be living under our means to be able to weather the storm.
I never expected that our family would be as hard pressed as we were in 2007. We’d been living beyond our means and got ourselves in a mess of trouble. Thanks be to God, we got out of debt.
Getting out of debt and living on one income have been some of the best things we’ve ever done.
Jessica says
Thanks for sharing my post!