We did this, and I absolutely LOVE it! However, it wasn't an easy decision, and we did have to work really hard to make it a sustainable reality. It took us several years to get to a point where we felt that we could make part-time single income work happen. that it not to say that it would take most people that long, but we had a lot of loose ends that really needed tying up before we could make reduced hours a reality for us.
Here was our process and how we made it happen.
1. Several years ago Aaron came to me and told me that he was feeling completely overwhelmed by the full time hours of his job and the nature of that job, and that he needed to make a big change or quit completely. Yikes! After talking it over we decided that he either needed to quit programming completely and go back to school for something else (expensive!) or find some way to get his employer to reduce his hours. We decided to explore the possibility of him taking one day off a week, reducing his hours and our income by 20%.
2. We paid off all our consumer debts over the next two years, simplified our expenses dramatically, and tried to "plug the money leaks" in our lives, mainly by reducing our dining out and travel habits (I take a lot of road trips and such to visit family).
3. We took a good look at the realities of reducing Aaron's work hours. We wanted to reduce down to 32 hours, cutting both hours and salary by 20%. We made sure we would still have good health insurance, retirement, and vacation benefits, because those are important to us.
4. We approached Aaron's employer and discussed the hour reduction. We were given a mixed reaction, and a "lets talk about it in six months" as an answer. Six months later we asked again, and this time got the "go ahead." We planned to go down to 32 hours a week in three months.
5. We tightened our budget, rewriting it completely. We reduced our spending, and decided on what the minimum amount of money we wanted to save each month, since we felt it was very important to consistently save even with a smaller income. We worked hard to come up with a budget that would have us spending much less, but would still allow us to live in a comfortable manner and to build savings.
6. Then we lived within that budget completely for three months while we saved the extra money. This did two things. First, we got to have a "trial run" to make sure we could get by on the reduced income, and see if we had the discipline to make it work. Second, it allowed us to save extra money for several months, and this went in to emergency savings and into separate accounts for future auto repairs, annual payments, and the like.
7. At the end of three months, once we were confident that we could indeed reduce our income without slipping back into debt, we made the change.
The first month was nerve wracking for me but wonderful. After the first month it became clear that we were absolutely able to make this work, and that we loved having more time together and feel much happier as a result. We have zero regrets about the decision, and feel like a big weight has been lifted off the family. We are making it work financially, and are even finding that we are saving MORE money than before. The reason for that is that we have become super committed to our budget, AND we feel much happier in our daily lives and don't feel that need to spend more money to be happy.
