re: Wife quit her professional medical job when we decided to have a kid

quote:

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Both parents working has masked our relative decrease in standard of living

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And the social safety net hasn't filled in with any sort of practical help for the middle class.

I mean really poor people can get foodstamps, but the average person can't get "free" daycare until their kids are old enough to go to school.

In my area even the cheap daycares are the majority of my wife's salary. If she continued working it would be mostly to cover the daycare when she is at work.

In fact the best case scenario for our standard of living would be to get divorced on paper and THEN have a kid, so she could claim absolute poverty and get benefits like food stamps and medical care via Medicaid. I don't want to do the math, but I would guess the cost of daycare plus all the benefits she could get from divorced poorness would cover the loss of her income to our household.

It shouldn't be that way.