You are a young master. You worked hard to get your degree and find a teaching position. You love what you do. You are good at it. But you love your husband/wife, you both want a family, and you are not getting any younger. They are both well educated and know the importance of staying home with their baby for at least 3 years. New research says 5 years. You’ve looked at your finances and talked and talked and talked. Finally, they both decide that for the sake of the baby and the children to come, they will stay home with the children. Before you make this decision and quit your teaching job, you need to consider some additional issues and get some agreements in writing.

Before making this decision, you simply need to face one major problem: 50% of all marriages end in divorce. No one plans a family if divorce is even remotely being considered. But over time, sometimes things happen and you find yourself facing a divorce. You suddenly realize that the joint decision you made years before will have no joint consequences unless you prepare and have some things in writing.

It initially dealt with the negative consequence of lost revenue, but that was shared equally; and your children will benefit from the positive effects of being with you. However, there are many potential negative consequences that only one of you will pay for.

Other things to consider:

1. Never leave teaching in the middle of the course if it’s posible. When I got pregnant, the baby was due in June. I just would have needed to miss the last few weeks of school; but “for the benefit of my students” I left during the semester. My reasoning was that students would be better off with one teacher for the entire semester rather than having a substitute just for a few weeks at the end of the school year. All that was true and very noble. However, that decision came back to bite me twice. When I went back to teaching in another state several years later and they were figuring out how many years of experience they would give me, they flippantly said “we don’t count half years.”

Years later, while my retirement was being calculated, again “we don’t count half years.” At the time, I had four and a half years (one as a baby, one as a parent with cancer, and two of holding temporary positions upon returning to teaching) that should have placed me two years higher on the retirement chart, but “don’t count half years”. What was good for my students turned out to be very bad for me, permanently bad for me. Your students are important, but YOU are more important. Make decisions based on YOU, not them.

2. Understand that for every year you don’t teach, you are moving down a rung on the salary scale. If you don’t teach for 10 years, you will enter the pay scale 10 steps below your peers. That is a huge pay gap and one that is permanent. You will never be able to offset that payment. While this is very frustrating, as long as you’re married, it’s not a big deal. But if he gets divorced and didn’t make any arrangements in writing, then ONLY YOU get that consequence. His spouse went straight up the pay scale while you didn’t. You need some sort of ongoing “pay-as-you-go” from your spouse so that he or she isn’t the only one paying for that joint decision.

3. #2 also affects your retirement if your state has its own retirement plan for public employees. Colorado calculates retirement on both your number of years of experience and your HAS (highest average salary for 3 years). If you stayed out of teaching for 10 years, then you have 10 fewer years of experience, and because you are lower on the pay scale, your HAS is much lower. You get bitten twice for that joint decision.

Four. This problem may or may not affect you, depending on the state. When calculating retirement, Colorado puts a 15% limit on how much your salary can increase from one pay year to the next. The purpose of this rule is to prevent people from being given managerial positions just to increase their salary before they retire. It seems logical, right? What is not logical is that the passage of time is not taken into account. So when you stay out of teaching for 10 years and come back, your new salary will probably be 15% higher than when you left for time. But when it comes to calculating retirement, your new higher salary doesn’t fully count toward your HAS. They allow you only 15% more than your last salary even though they were separated for 10 years. (And this ends every year too). He caught me twice! With no time allotment, this is a very unfair rule and the people it usually affects are the parents who stayed home to raise the children. This should be against the law!

I know it seems horrible to have to think about these things when you feel so excited about starting a family. I also know that it’s easy to convince yourself that something should happen, your spouse will be fair. After all, they loved each other once and had children together. Right? Incorrect! When it comes to the almighty dollar, everything else goes out the window! I speak from experience on each of these issues. I have bite marks for each one!

To summarize: Get in writing:

(1) An automatic increase in child support for each year. I didn’t have this, he wouldn’t volunteer it, and to get it I had to go back to another state, get a lawyer and fight. I couldn’t afford to do that, so I paid for every raise the kids incurred as they grew up and went through high school. You shouldn’t have to do this. not well

(2) Some form of salary adjustment from your spouse to compensate for your position on the lower pay scale. Discuss this at the beginning and get it in writing.

(3) Some form of division of your spouse’s retirement or a separate retirement account for yourself that your spouse pays to compensate for the death in retirement. Protect your retirement. You may have to live on it for a long time. My retirement is almost half of what it should be due to half years and unfair 15% caps. And, now, there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. (The final indignity is that if you live in a state with its own pension fund, the federal government won’t let you collect any Social Security you’ve earned from other sources. Great!)

The decision to raise a family is an important one and the benefits to your children of staying home with them are enormous; but the decision must be a joint decision and the consequences (of which there will be many) must also be joint.