- I have five children ranging from teenagers to elementary school.
- My husband is a public school teacher and I am self-employed.
- Little did I know that my children were going to get more expensive as they grew up.
The sad truth about my life as a mother of five children, ranging from adolescence to elementary school, is that I have been living beyond my means for a very long time.
My husband is a public school teacher in a rural area, and I’m self-employed, so our income is modest. But with five kids – and two teenagers to boot – I just don’t know how to make it all work.
I knew having children would be expensivebut I didn’t expect kids to cost more as they grow up.
Our cost of living has increased
Between shopping, electricity and heating bills, car insurancehealth insurance, home and property insurance, car bills, life insurance, dental insurance and unexpected expenses, we have seen our cost of living explode over the last three years. Our bills have literally tripled in some cases, but our income has not increased.
To give you a little insight into my finances, this month alone the following bills have all come due:
- Sports trips: $1,000
- Six-month car insurance contract for two adults and one teenage driver: $2,800
- Home insurance: $4,000
- Winter property taxes: $2,200
- Dental appliance: $4,000
- New tires for winter: $2,000
I guess I should have expected parenting to be extremely expensive, but I can honestly say I didn’t expect my kids to cost much more as they got older.
Teenagers are so expensive
Teenagers bring a whole new wave of expenses that I hadn’t prepared for: everything costs more with teenagers. Aside from “big” expenses like more expensive car insurance, technology for college, and gas, even the little things cost more. For example, while I could once run to the store and buy my kids $5 shirts for the school year, now it costs a lot more to outfit them. Everything, including socks, shoes, toiletries, sports, and school fees, keeps increasing, with no end in sight.
Aside from the questionable extravagance of a sports trip, my husband and I do everything we can to make our lives work. I shop at Aldi for groceries, our kids wear hand-me-downs and Walmart clothes, I save money whenever possible, we rarely go out to eat, my kids have jobs and my husband has two other jobs outside of his full-time job. as a teacher. My job funds our limited streaming services and phones, and our entertainment mostly takes place at home (or watching our siblings’ games, of course.)
I wonder if I should have stayed home when they were little
The frustration of feeling like our expenses are out of control made me think about the choices I made as a mom. I’ve always prided myself on being mostly at home with my kids. After I became a mother Unexpectedly, during my senior year of college, I tried my best to do what I thought “good” moms should do and worked extremely hard to always be home as much as possible with my children – I worked nights and built a career as a freelancer. that I could be the constant parental presence at home. And I was proud of it.
But now that I have two teenagers and am about to welcome a third, I wonder if I ultimately made the right choice. Should I have spent more time working back then and saved money for this period of my life when my children still need me in very tangible and albeit more expensive ways? Have I really thought about the tradeoff between my earning potential and how much we might need that money as teenagers?
My experience so far is that the teenage years are just as time consuming as the early years of babies and toddlers. They obviously don’t have the same level of physical exhaustion and lack of sleep, but they are incredibly taxing mentally and emotionally. Add to that the stress of trying to pay for everything and work more because you think the kids are “more independent,” and it can lead to disaster. I feel so exhausted right now trying to provide for myself when the truth is my teenagers need me to be present emotionally and physically more than ever.