cost of daycare

sorry had to vent a little. I really love being able to stay home and be here for my children. I think it is important. Times being what they are I am looking for a job. But what I will have to pay in day care for 3 kids I will end up making nothing or even paying out of pocket for all my kids to go to daycare during the summer



ahhh just one of those times need to figure out something :scratch:

Have you considered being a certified SFG teacher - and look for the book coming out soon, if it not out already about making money with your SFG.

Have seedlings ready for farmers market maybe? things like that? Here where we live 3 yrs to make a profit on the business, I am writing off feed and seeds this year
Ha-v-v

hmmm I would love to be able to make money off my garden. hmm off to research..

any more ideas would be great

Do you sew? how about re usable grocery bags I plan on selling this year at farmers market, not sure how well they will go over but I think if Im using them, it might nudge someone to buy

And !! If you are growing more veggies and dont have to buy them that will save some money too
My fingers and toes are crossed something comes along so you can stay home

Cheering for newstart !!
Ha-v-v

When my sons were little, I "brought home" data entry and other administrative work from various places. I understand you can still do things like this as well as things like medical billing from home.

I don't know how much you need to bring in each month, but I can tell you that you won't NECESSARILY make a LOT money from a SFG business unless you can go "all out" and have enough room to make your own version of Mel's Mix. I don't have kids under foot and I find it difficult to find time (and considerable energy) to make "SFG4U Growing Medium" (you can't call it Mel's Mix). Also the start-up costs are high.

Teaching (almost free once you get your "system" down), blended compost & the growing medium are our biggest profit makers. You don't make a HUGE profit on books or raised beds - and you will need to consider possibly having to run to the Post Office or UPS to fulfill orders.

If you intend to only teach classes, that's not a reliable income source. Start up costs for this are time (they give you a Power Point presentation, but I've needed to customize it several times depending on who/where I'm teaching). We needed a lap-top, projector, screen, copying costs for handouts & brochures, props, etc.

By NO MEANS am I trying to discourage you from becoming a Certified Teacher or starting a SFG business, but you need to be fully aware of the start-up costs. PLUS setting up a "legal" business takes quite a bit of time - dealing with the IRS and State Comptroller, etc. We also needed to deal with the department that handles Weights & Measures to sell the growing medium. LOL then there's paying for a web site, business cards, possibly advertising, a new computer, a cement mixer (blending compost or making mix in quantity is HARD), bags, an accountant, etc.

My business partner & I HOPE to turn a profit soon - it's been almost a year.

newstart.....Have you thought about getting another 2 or 3 kids to care for at home? With you being home anyway with your own, you could make a profit. In most states you can care for a small number other than your own without any licensing, etc to make it all worthless. You might have some neighbors or their friends that could use your services. And even add a couple more kids after school lets out til their folks can pick them up at suppertime.

Unless you can grow a specialty crop in huge numbers I don't see how you can make a living with SFG.

newstart,

I'm also a stay-at-home mom and from time to time I've wondered about how to re-enter the workforce. Personally, I have a spouse who provides for us and my first choice if I had to take work would be to find a job that I could do on evenings/weekends so I could care for the kids while he was at work and vice versa.

Another thing to consider, is that it is highly likely that there are other moms out there who really want to stay home with their young children, but who need to earn some money to help make ends meet. This is the new type of nanny. Someone who could care for your children alongside of theirs. It buys them more time at home, and costs you less than daycare.

Gweniffer,
My wife Alison is like you .. we have a 10yr old female Munchkin with the added burden of me being double disabled & frequently needing help a couple of time or more a day.


Alison has worked from home for over 17 years & also been an employee from a business place of work in the day time at the same time

About 15 yrs ago when I got injured for the second time Alison decided she needed to stop being an employee as such , attending a place of work and work from home so she could look after me.

What transpired has been very good to us , for she can usually stop what she is doing for 24 hrs or slightly more and play in the day or night with a now 10 yr old munchkin & me etc. I can often take her out to a decent lunch whilst munchkin is at school which is rather nice & romantic some days.

What Alison does/did was join a home workers site & paid approximately $ 50 USD joining fee .. we did our research beforehand to see if it was a scam or a genuine things and found much to our joy it was bona fide.

There were several short term assignments that paid well like editing & correcting books , technical documents & thesis etc.

Then one day an opening came along that offered a couple of in the companies premise training days & a parapatetic trainer to visit us at home , to apply you had to send in a typed email saying who you were , what you had done etc but not as a CV more as an essay ( to check your grasp of the langi=uage and level of education perhaps ? ).

More out of curiosity Alison did what ws asked and was given a place to go to for the basic training all expenses paid.
She had joined the ranks of the people who electronically do press cutting/indexing .. her work goes all round the world and cover thousands & thousands of companies .. she still has time to mess around in the garden with me , go shopping & having retail theraphy , do some of the other household chores that I cant do and thoroughly enjoys the whole scenario.

The best thing is she does not need a car as the office desk will either be in our Kitchen / diner or out in the office , she doen't need her former wardrobe of expensive business suits and matching shoes as she wears jeans & a tee shirt etc.

Her most accurate observation is that without all the normal associated costs of being in & getting to work she is financially far better off working from home as there are also tax allowances over here in the UK if you use a room in your home for your work .

To get the same net income at the end of the month she would have to have a job making just over £ 45K ( $60,000 ish USD ) a year and at present that sort of income in the UK tends to be like gold dust .... as well as being absolutely soul less it would mean being a company man 24/7 x 365

I feel your pain. I have 3 children and would have never made if not for my mom taking care of them. She is sick now and I stay home. We barely make it but we manage. I think if you grew odd things for fall you could take them to the famers market and maybe look through the catalogue's and find a few things you could take to the farmers market. I know we are a small town so the farmers market does pretty good and they never have a table full of the same thing just random stuff that look good for dinner. One basket of squash pays for your seeds. 3-4 dollars a basket.

Plantoid - ditto...ditto...ditto...

I work for a state funded online high school. While it does require me to travel maybe once or twice per month on day trips, the rest of the time I work from home. Ditto on the wardrobe. Ditto on cost of gas. Ditto on flexible hours. Ditto the tax deductions for portions of your home costs.

I have several friends in this same field and hope that more and more careers will find a place for working at home. There are some considerations, though:

If you have very young children it's tough to find the time to work at home if you do not have someone else home with you tending to the children. Younger children require more attention and it's tough to concentrate on your work and tend to the needs of younger children. If you are only working hours after they go to bed, or when they nap, that normally isn't enough to consider it "full time" unless you require little to no sleep.

You never leave "the job". You don't punch out at "x" time and that's it for your day. Your job is your kitchen counter and you have to get used to the idea that it's always there, always present, and you have to MAKE yourself go to lunch or play with the Munchkin, which isn't easy to do when you aren't "released" from the job by virtue of the fact that it's 5:01 p.m. Your kids will come to resent your face in front of the computer or on the phone, because you are there, but you are not there.

Just because you are home, does not mean you are able to do household tasks all day. You have other tasks for your employment to complete, and so the piles of laundry, or dust in the living room have to go unattended while you work, even though you are at home. That is sometimes a tough concept for the general public to understand. We are lucky to have some flexibility, but it's not like we can just stop in the middle of a conference call and go vacuum the playroom.

If you can master responsibilities of work and home, and above all the timing of your day/week, to devote a healthy amount of attention to work, home and family, and self, then it's a great blessing! I consider myself fortunate to have found this career for myself at a time when my son was about your Munchkin's age and it was an awesome fit!

I never had the desire to stay home with my kid. It takes a very special person to be home with young people full-time and I don't have what it takes. If you do, I also recommend adding children to your care. The woman who watches my daughter says it is easier when my kid is there - they entertain each other. Her daughter is a year older than mine. She doesn't ask for much money from me, but it is enough that she has been able to reconnect her cable. And I'm saving so much over what I was paying the program at the school that my kid had the best Christmas ever!

Ditto Nancy. It's not in my genetic makeup to be a SAHM. I commend any woman brave enough to stay with their kids 24/7. I work with many women that work weekends only , while the hubbies or significant others are at home. I now work nights and my parents watch the kids for 4 hours at night until my husband gets off work at 10pm. Nothing like having that "safe" feeling of grandma's in charge and my checkbook is loving it also.

As for Farmer's Market items, I noticed that Kohlrabi was rare with only one vendor selling it.

I discovered last night that in my home town there is a co-op for Urban gardeners who want to sell goods at the farmer's market. Amazing! Makes sense, as the amount of produce you'd have to grow to sustain your own booth, plus the time/money/labor hours involved in setting up and running the booth would exempt most home gardeners.

I'm a strong advocate of daycare, based on personal experience of benefits for both parents & child(ren). I'm also a strong advocate of entreprenureship and at-home businesses. There are significant benefits of staying at home and doing other things.

• Everything you do for yourself and family is money that does not have to be earned or taxed. In addition, doing for self puts you in a lower tax bracket. Every veggie you grow in SFG represents money that does not have to be earned, taxed and spent. Total Self-sufficiency may be too much hard work and time consuming to be an economic end in and of itself. But there is a point, perhaps unique to each family, where there are significant advantages to being as self-sufficient as you can. The trick is finding the balance between advantages and disadvantages. This can only be done by physical involvement in the project.
  

• If you are at home when your kids come home from school/daycare, that is a very good thing. Much better than kids coming home to an empty house.
  

• You MUST take responsibility for your own intellectual and creative growth while child-rearing at home. The consequences of not doing so can be invisible but personally debilitating and cumulative. This is more important than money!
  

• An at-home business requires less startup investment, less over-head, and has more tax-deductions than any other activity. While the taxable profits may be relatively small, positive cash flow should not be dismissed as a benefit. Everything you learn as a small time entrepreneur can be transferred to a larger situation/occupation when those kids have grown. [Make sure you keep your resume of accomplishments up to date!]
  

• Don't dismiss yard/garage sales as a means of raising capital and/or selling your product.
  

• Be sure to work out your profit margins before you begin. Your profit margins MUST be large enough to pay for your mistakes and to provide a surplus which can be invested in your growth.
  

• Don't be ashamed to scrounge, buy 2nd or 3rd hand, aggressively bargain, comparison shop, etc. when acquiring infrastructure, parts, components, raw materials, etc. Buy it right, and that will increase your profit margin.
  

• Think everything through to its logical conclusion. Plan everything, experiment, be flexible and record the results.
  

Hope this helps a bit.

Tom

With respect to child care when you are at home.

whilst I was laid up alison stil had a baby abd work to contend with most days.
what we did ( the british names might be different but the essence is here ) was to appoach the local further education facility where they ran child care courses and we were used as trainee placements.