16 Mar

When my son was born in September 2016 my wife stayed home with him for what was supposed to be about 4 months, turned into 8 months and then turned into 3 years and 9 months.  There is an entire post on that titled “First Year of Parenthood!” that breaks down the timeline along with how and why it extended.  In May 2020 however that changed and my wife was back to work full time and we were working to put her newly found income to work.

It was always in the plan for my wife to return to work even after the indefinite stay home in the aforementioned post, and the rough timeline was always surrounding pre-school.  We were on the path for the end of 2020 to potentially be the beginning of my end of employment but in any case wanted additional income coming in to help ensure we were covered in the business search.  She began her search for employment lightly in late January and became more serious in February gaining some ground and finding a part time offer that could have turned into Full Time over time.  The opportunity was for a local higher end grocery store chain doing some food management and programming surrounding the Saturday Samples programs, recipe design to sell batch ingredients in their ads, and more.  She was one for one on her interview to job offer ratio which was an excellent start to the process and we asked for a week to make a determination on child care and how it may or may not work.  We crunched the numbers and it just didn’t make sense, not only because it was part time but I was part time and the hourly rate was about 2/3 of what we presumed her working hours to be worth and respectfully declined.

The ultimate initial goal was part time to ease back into the working world because afterall we didn’t greatly need the money, we just wanted to increase our savings rate and cash cushion going into the new business venture and then between then and kindergarten find the right balance to ease the rest of the way to full time.  In the back of our minds and discussions was always “if we find an offer you can’t refuse, push come to shove, I guess do it”.  She continued her hunt and began the interview process for two more companies on essentially the same timeline for the first through third rounds of interviews.  This was mid-late February of 2020 when it began and one was a pie and baking company which she’s a pro at, and the other was a organic & natural food brand that did beverage and soup type products that were sold on or in retail products.  The final rounds of interviews were on Zoom courtesy of the Pandemic, from a hotel in Florida the second week of March 2020 while we were on vacation.  I do want to digress a moment and make clear we traveled March 8^th-12^th 2020 which was the last week you were allowed to travel in America before you were lumped into the “terrible person” category basically if you remember the video of that college kid basically saying “yolo” going viral (pun intended). Anyway, the final round of interviews happened via Zoom and she was awaiting the follow up phone calls as they made their internal decisions.

Late the following business week she received her first offer which came from the pie company and it fell in the “offer we can’t refuse category” so we began working out the kinks of the child care situation that was beginning to take shape as a need.  We asked for a week or so to be able to evaluate child care plans and begin figuring out the mechanics of how this would all work out because this had happened faster than we’d anticipated.  Of course on our end of the call we were also waiting for an offer from the other company not only as a comparison point but it was the direction she preferred to go anyway.  The offer came in within a couple days and while it was lower, it also fell in the “offer you can’t refuse” category.  While the second offer was the one she and we wanted it, it was lower so we weighed them back and forth because the each had their merits when it came to total compensation.  The first offer was about $10,000 higher per year, health care costs were about a wash, the 401k option was slightly better from a match standpoint but we couldn’t access it until 1 year of employment was complete  The second offer was $10,000 lower, health care costs were about a wash, the 401k match was about 1% less but we had access to it at the beginning of her 4^th month, and finally, she worked 1 fewer hour per day, and the commute was about 18 minutes a day versus just over 30 minutes to the other.

The decision was clear on which offer we were prepared to accept, we just needed to work on leveraging the better offer to see if we could pick up any salary gap.  While my wife doesn’t love my coaching in general and I tend to leave her alone, she did ask for my help on this one and while I’ve never negotiated a raise or job offer, I have negotiated several deals and know how to make both sides feel good when they walk away from the table.  I chewed on it for a day or so and landed on our script.

We landed on the following script for her to call the hiring manager or director to use:  “Hi Tony, I’m really excited to talk to you today, I love your team and everything you are doing and working on as a group.  Its clear to me that I’ll fit in well within your team and I want to be at your company, but I do need to be candid.  I have another offer that is about $10,000 higher a year than what you are offering, frankly, I’m leaning your direction and I’m not going to ask you to come all the way up to that number but want to know what you can do to help close that gap?”

The truth is there are probably better ways to leverage that offer and maybe come out with more money but we didn’t want to ask for $10k, have them be unable to offer a dime, and start the employment relationship with any negativity.  The salary they offered was significantly higher than what we had planned for when the return to work hunt began, so we would have been completely content at their offer.  His reply was very favorable and essentially was paraphrased as “I’m not sure I can do very much from a salary standpoint but I’ll see what I can do, I’ll look into additional PTO days as well, and get back with you”.  They came back with an additional $4,000 a year, more PTO, and we accepted on the spot.  It was exciting and nerve racking all at once, as we were about to make some big life changes from stay at home mom, to working mom with our son in some form of pre-school/child care, and eventually starting a business.

While life isn’t all about money and savings rate, there is a balance and a trade off that needs to be considered and while each families situation is going to be different, the direction for our household was clear.  Our son was in love with pre-school and becoming more and more independent as time went on, as independent as you can be for a 3 ½ year old anyway.  We were prepared to get him into a more full time pre-school situation plus had great before/after care options if needed.  My sister had recently moved back to Minnesota from China and lived just 8 minutes away with a flexible work schedule, and my sons best friends mom was a stay at home mom that was very willing to help as she stayed home and also runs a nanny firm that she owns as well.  In addition to all of that we were able to slow start her start date at work since we were mid-pandemic and held off until the second week of May which gave her about 7-8 weeks from offer acceptance to start date.

There has certainly been a change in the dynamic of our household and getting things figured out in our new-normal household version while also dissecting the worlds new-normal.  At the time of this writing she’s been back to work for nearly 2 months and we’ve settled in well, our son loves his routine including split time between my sisters and his friends house. We get our time with him in the evenings from as early as 3:30 until bed time and we pack in a days’ worth of cherishing in those hours.  He’s a great kid, he’s learning new things, she’s a great wife and executing on new things at work, and our savings account is about to grow but if I’m being honest we’ve spent nearly every penny she took home thus far to get ourselves new carpet that was 5 years past due in our house. Trust me when I say, that splurge was worth it.  It reminds me of a Bigger Pockets Podcast guest who said every time they buy a new rental house he underwrites in the cost of a vacation for the family so that “every time we buy a house, everyone celebrates because we get to go on a vacation!”, sound advice that we applied in our own roundabout way.