After Evelyn was born in May 2007, I desperately wanted to stay home with her.  I had a daycare lined up, I had promised to come back to work after a long enough period of time that our HR department had to call the state department of personnel to find out if it was okay (I worked for a state agency.)  I just could not bear the thought of sending my sweet, tiny little baby to daycare, and more than that, I felt like I was supposed to be home with her.  I couldn’t see myself going back to work because it just felt like it was meant to be.  And yet.. time was ticking along and nothing had really jumped up to stop me from my return to work.

So I played with numbers and we had a lot of conversations about how we couldn’t afford for me to stay home.  I had a pretty good job.  Actually, I made more than my husband did at that time, and adding me to his insurance plan would be outrageously expensive. There was no financial sense in it at all, no matter how we looked at it, but finally, we made the decision to take a leap of faith.  By stripping everything unnecessary out of our budget,  we decided that we could probably make it work until she was around two, and then we’d be pretty much broke and I’d have to go back to work.  We had a fairly respectable “margin”, as we call it, in our savings account, and we were prepared to watch it dwindle in order to finance a couple of years of me being a stay-at-home mom.

Immediately after I quit, my husband got a second job dropped into his lap.  It was an actual work-from-home job of the type you know is a scam, but it wasn’t.  It was difficult sometimes during those days, when I had a four-month old baby all day, and then M came home and still had to work, but those paychecks helped.  That lasted for a year, and then by the time it was over, he was earning more at his day job (and working longer hours, sadly) and I had begun the couponing journey.  After a while, it became more than just a hobby and became my primary form of financial household contribution.

The reason I’m writing this is because the husband and I called a business meeting yesterday during naptime, just to officially check in our finances.  I pulled out the same legal pad that still contains all of my calculations on how we could afford for me to stay home, flipped to a new page and started listing all of the assets that we have in all accounts, and added to that the value of all uncashed checks laying around. (I sound like we are just rolling in accounts and checks, don’t I?  It’s because a) I open lots of accounts for bonuses as part of my money-earning process and b) M’s job does not pay by direct deposit, even though last I checked it is 2009, and c) I get quite a few fiddly little rebate checks.)  Evelyn is over two years old now–actually, this is the same time of year I ended up quitting my job.  Not only am I still a SAHM, and not only are we not flat broke at this point, thanks to the preceding two years–we have actually saved money.  We have saved more than half again of the respectable margin that we had in the bank to begin with. We have done this, even though we originally expected that we would be losing money every month, and our calculations were, sad to say, way off to begin with.  And not only that! We have done a lot less scrimping than we had planned for, and we’ve had a lot more expensive things than we bought before. (You just don’t see coupons for generics, you know?)

And that is why I do this.  That is why I can justify spending hours a week at shopping, and planning my lists in meticulous detail, and clipping coupons and scouting for deals and bringing home mountains of items that I don’t need just to throw them in a yard sale.  It’s why I don’t have time for The Sims 3.  It’s why I will argue with a cashier over a fifty cent coupon. It’s why I subject myself to Rite Aid.  It’s why I have a mountain of papers on my desk and don’t have time to write in Evelyn’s baby book.  It’s why I drag a small child into boring stores on a regular basis and occasionally suffer dire consequences for it.  It’s why I spend Evelyn’s precious naps filling out rebate forms and printing coupons and organizing paperwork, even though I would much rather be reading or crafting or playing. It’s why there are dishes in the sink and laundry waiting to be folded.

And it’s why I get to spend every single day looking at this little face.

100_0111 Fair trade.