How homeschoolers cut back to a single income

In my career coaching life I have noticed many patterns that come up over and over again.

  • For example, many women who are 35 and unmarried have commitment issues.
  • Many men who are 45 and want coaching have a family with a burn rate that is on track to exceed their earning power.
  • First-generation immigrants in their 20s don’t have career problems as much as they have parent problems.

Now that I’ve been coaching people about how to start homeschooling, I’ve noticed a pattern there as well. And it surprises me: The most common struggle with homeschoolers is money. Specifically, many people I coach are a two-income family and would have to change to one income so one parent (mostly) could homeschool. Read more

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How much does it cost to homeschool?

A lot of people think they want to homeschool but they don’t think they can afford it. So they ask me: How much does it cost to homeschool?

I think it’s more instructive to ask the question the other way around: How much does it cost to send your kids to school? Because the answer is that it costs a lot. In fact, the Atlantic just ran an essay by a guy who is homeschooling because it’s more cost effective than sending his kid to a good school. Read more

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Here’s the career math to know if you should homeschool

In hindsight I see that my path to homeschooling was largely a math problem. In the process of making my decision I didn’t realize it was a mostly a math problem, but it was.

Here’s how it goes:

1. Good school districts are in expensive neighborhoods.
I had in my head what a “good” school district is. I want to New Trier, in Illinois. It is on anyone’s list of top high schools in the country. I wanted my kids to have that.

Then, when I realized that those brick-lined streets I grew up with are for the very rich. This photo, for example, is a tree-lined street in my childhood neighborhood peppered with tw0-million-dollar homes. And it’s the poor section of the New Trier school district. Read more

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