I remember our broke days very well. My kids are teens now and get nostalgic of the day trips we took to state parks and lakes for free swimming when I made them *special sandwiches* (fluffernutters....cause we were broke😂) and how much fun they had!!

*raises hand* I’m in this club. :D When the kids hit school I became a work-from-home mom writing. It has it’s ups and downs (I’m in a down phase right now and very broke) but it worked best for us.

I was a SAHM for 10 years after trying every type of work-life balance possible. I had 3 kids in 5 years and childcare costs made it a no-brainer to stay home. It was awesome! We lived within our means and I am now back to working FT and love it. There really is no magic bullet to raising kids. Just do what works best…

This!!! We lived as a family of 5 on one income for almost a decade because I bought secondhand everything and cooked/grew most of our own food. We lived within our means and I felt guilt *sometimes* saying no to my kids when they wanted new flashy-trashy toys, but having less stuff made them appreciate what we had.

Maybe this is sort of a tangential point, but I would love to see an article on the size and impact of the informal, non-consumer childrearing economy. From my personal experience, there is a massive informal economy of people selling, trading, and giving away their used baby and kid stuff once they’re done with it.…

Great article!!! I’m in the minority of most women I know as I’m a SAHM. My husband works insanely crazy hours and for me to go back to work the cost of daycare amounted to about 70% of my paycheck. Sooooooo it just made way more sense for us. It’s not always easy but we manage and live pretty comfortably. 

Holy shit this is brilliant. Well written and extremely comprehensive.

The older I get the more disdain I have for lines of any sort.  Especially for food.  I have a hard time believing there’s any food worth waiting in a three hour line for.

The only thing more bougie than ironically enjoying an opiate-of-the-masses burger is complaining about how bougie it is to do so.

Real estate is all about location. We bought our first home almost 20 years ago for $250k and it is now assessed at $575k and our school/real estate taxes are $9000. We paid off our mortgage already but the cost of living and real estate prices are completely riduculous!! When our youngest graduates high school, we…

Yeah, your location is probably the single largest determining factor. A good percentage of my friends are smack in the center of the cohort that got most extremely fucked over by the housing bubble burst and/or job losses in the recession. Many were just graduating college or grad school when the economy tanked and…

Parents who both had full time jobs. 

Yep to all you said! I grew up in urban communal living with shared houses, schooling, budgets, the whole thing. Despite all the artsy, progressive, feminist mission statements, looking back, it was a fucking bureaucratic, patriarchal mess. But that’s the structure that my parents generation were working from. I…

Kids today also lack many of the skills you need to live that cheaply. Look at the “bone broth”-trend a couple of years ago. For my mother’s generation, making broth is no more amazing than making a sandwich but millenials on instagram acted like they had crafted a rainbow with their own hands. Lifehacker had a guide…

Cathy is baptist garbage and they donated 2 million of the profits they made from the store to anti gay groups through the Winshape foundation.

***My bird call brings all the hens to the yard, damn right!- it’s louder than yours- damn right! it’s louder than yours- I could teach you, but I’d have to charge(the same as bjork does for her birdcall box set-only $607!) damn right, it’s louder than yours***

I’ve been trying to figure out why I’ve hated Taylor’s voice...and I just figured it out on this song: there’s no warmth or resonance. It’s cold, calculated, flat, and unimaginative. Having just listened (for the 1000th time) to Tapestry...King is not a great singer, but she squeezes so much out of her notes. You can…

Seriously. 

I second the epidural. Request a patient controlled thing (not sure the proper name, but you can pump it with your finger when you need to- it’s brilliant).

I’m hardly a fan of Miley, but apparently neither were wearing their rings for the past few months which kind of indicates she probably was telling the truth of them being over even if they hadn’t officially announced it.....and yet his team went “infidelity” when those photos came out. So I can kind of see her being…