Without a doubt, living on one salary has its challenges, and by far the biggest one for us, or anyone, is health insurance. This is tricky. We have dealt with health insurance over the years using many different methods, none of which are ideal. When I stayed home with the girls and Bruce didn’t have health insurance through his employer, we bought independent health insurance that covered NOTHING. I mean, we were paying almost $400 a month and every time we went to the doctor we had to pay towards our deductible, meaning the full bill. We finally just gave up, because all we were doing was paying, paying, paying, and receiving no benefits.

So when I returned to work as a teacher, I received full benefits, but the costs for the family were exorbitant: upwards of $500 per month. We knew that there was no way we could afford it, so we didn’t even consider it. I know what you’re thinking: what would we do if something tragic happened? Is it worth the risk? No one can answer that question for us; it was a risk we were willing to take at the time.

Luck plays a hand when you are making good choices for your family, I think. Just a few weeks into teaching I came across a flyer that advertised CHP+, the state-funded health care program for children. Of course, with my minuscule salary at the time, we qualified! So since we put our kids on that health insurance, we have an annual bill of a whopping $35 and co-pays of just $5.

Unfortunately, we could not afford to have Bruce on any health insurance until I had been working for more than two years and I received a couple of raises. Even then, it was a struggle to afford, but we managed until they changed the insurance. Now we are back in the same boat, risking the possibility of injury or illness to save money… but what can we do? What else can we cut? It is a terrible choice for a family to have to make, but it is our choice.

Back to our remaining $350… that easily covered the trash, about $20 per month, $80 for the phone bill, $150 for gas, and just a measly $100 for EVERYTHING else. I’m not going to lie. It wasn’t always easy. When we had to get the car fixed, when pipes froze, or when some other emergency happened, we had to put everything on a credit card, which I hate to do. But another huge benefit of having one income is a large tax return every year, so whenever we have to use the credit card, we are always able to pay it off with a portion of our tax return. And we never, in the four and a half years of living on one salary, have had to pay off more than $1500 on our credit card, leaving us with spending money!!

Yes, spending money! We have actually been able to take at least two vacations every year since this shift in salaries. One year, when I gave birth to baby number three and had an enormous amount of medical bills related to this, our tax return was so generous that we were able to take the whole family to Mexico for a week.

Vacations aside, what we have truly purchased with our one income is priceless. With a full time dad taking care of the children and the home, the errands, the grocery shopping, the cleaning, and cooking dinner every night, I do not endure the harried existence of many working mothers. And because of the multiple weeks of vacation time and holidays a teacher has, we have more family time than almost any other family I know. So, despite all the sacrifices and stresses we have faced over the years, it has been worth every minute of worry and every penny not received. We have a stronger, calmer, healthier, happier family, and no one could ever put a price on that.