When people find out my husband stays home with our three boys while I work full-time, most ask:
“but how can you afford it?”
The honest answer involves a lot of things like knowing our enough number and having real, open, and honest conversations about what we value and what we were buying with a second income.
I’ve written about all of that before, but there’s another part of the answer that rarely comes up in conversation.
Having a stay-at-home dad (SAHD) specifically saves us money in surprising ways that wouldn’t exist if I were a stay-at-home mom (SAHM). Here are four of them.
If you are a mom — staying home or not — you have been targeted. The algorithm knows you have a baby.
It has shown you the $400 stroller, the $180 white noise machine, and the beautiful wooden toy sets that your child will ignore in favor of an empty cardboard box.
It has sent you targeted ads for postpartum hair-growing supplements, sensory play kits, and subscription boxes of developmentally appropriate activities for every month of your baby’s life.
My husband gets ads for gardening tools and emergency prep gear.
The parenting marketing ecosystem is built around reaching mothers through Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook groups. He simply does not exist in that algorithm.
He has never once come to me saying “I saw this thing for the boys, and I think we need it.” He has never purchased a single kid’s item from a targeted ad (an anti-choking device doesn’t count, right?). He has never signed up for a parenting subscription box.
Targeted marketing works because it creates desire for things you didn’t know you needed. My husband’s immunity to the parenting marketing machine exists because nobody is trying to sell to him. The savings are entirely accidental but also very real.
There is a social dynamic among SAHMs that includes a low level of comparison around activities, classes, experiences, and the general curation of your child’s early years.
My husband is not a part of those playgroups because the social infrastructure was built by and for moms, and he does not fit into it.
In practice, this means that he doesn’t feel the pressure to sign the boys up for a music class that everyone else is doing, or to book the experience that’s being talked about in the mom group chat. His social circle as a SAHD is smaller, and the spending that comes from social comparison is almost nonexistent.
I’m not saying that this is entirely a good thing — the social struggles that come with SAHD life are worth talking about in their own article. But from a purely financial perspective, spending that comes from keeping up with social circles has been low in our one-income life, and his experience as a SAHD is a large part of why.
When something breaks in our house, my instinct is to look up a replacement. In contrast, my husband’s instinct is to look up how it works.
He has fixed our dryer at least twice, repaired the oven once, and every summer he spends time watching YouTube videos in order to fix whatever new thing is going wrong with our (very old) hand-me-down lawnmower.
I mentioned that my husband gets satisfaction from fixing things around our home one day on Substack Notes and got some comments from other women saying that their husbands do not appreciate this type of work.
I think it is more of a personality thing that is specific to my husband (one trait that I am extremely grateful for), and the practical result is that our home repair costs are a fraction of what they would be otherwise.
The throw pillow industry is not profiting from my husband.
There is an entirely optional category of spending that exists at the intersection of home decor and self-care. It includes beautiful and color-coordinated items that make your home feel like a sanctuary. Matching storage baskets. Accent chairs that nobody actually sits in. A single throw pillow that brings the room together but somehow costs $45.
I am not immune to this category, but my husband could not be more indifferent.
Our house is clean. It functions well. It does not have a coherent aesthetic or a seasonal wreath on the door. This saves us money every year in a category that is more normalized among many female homemakers.
None of this is to say that SAHMs spend irresponsibly or that SAHDs are better with money. This is about our specific household, dynamic, and the ways that I’ve seen one-income life play out because my husband is home with our kids instead of me.
I can’t put an exact dollar amount on any of it. But living this lifestyle firsthand, I know the savings are real.
The financial case for one income lives partly in a spreadsheet. But it's also the more subtle ways that life reorganizes itself when you’ve decided what actually matters most to your family.
Jenny :)
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