My family didn’t want me to give up my career to stay at home because they worried about how I would support myself if my husband passed away. Once they saw I’m serious about starting a business of my own they let it go.
My in-laws, on the other hand, just have very different ideas of what is important and what isn’t when raising a baby than my husband and I do. When my SIL was born my MIL didn’t take a single day off work, she went into the office the next day and brought the baby with her. She put her in a bassinet in the corner of the office and just kept right on working as though she hadn’t just delivered a baby. When my husband was born they hired a live in nanny to stay with the kids because both of the parents were working more than 60 hours a week. They banked crazy money and their kids always had every material possession they could ever have wanted but they spent almost no time with their parents. My SIL apparently believes this is the correct way to raise a baby and tearfully told my husband and I that it wasn’t fair to our baby to cut our household income in half because, “What if one day she asks you for something and you have to tell her no?” :dubious: When I explained that we are going to have to tell her no all the time because she is going to want candy for dinner and she is going to want to paint the dog and do all sorts of other things kids can’t do she got upset. She just doesn’t get why I wouldn’t want to give my child all the very best things in life and I just don’t get why she can’t see that I am giving my child the very best things in life by being the one to raise her. She has a happy mother who gives her tons of attention and I think that is the most important thing.
Besides it isn’t like we have to go on food stamps or anything because of this. We still live very well on just one income but we eat out a lot less and I can’t just buy random stuff that strikes my fancy anymore. When trying to explain all of this my SIL just kept being mystified that we wouldn’t want to give her everything and I finally told her that when she has kids of her own she can do what she likes but that we are doing what we think is best and she should shut the hell up. I also got a bit bitchy and told her that the first time her child calls the nanny Mom or draws a family picture and her mother isn’t in it she might have a better understanding of why I made the choice I did.
My parents raised 5 kids in a 1000 sq ft, 3/1.3 row house. I think we all turned out OK, more or less, but I know it played a part in my decision to leave home and join the Navy when I was 19…
Your sister’s husband needs to hold his horses on the kid front - and not just because of the house. Your sister can’t go from residency to fellowship to “real doctor” while pregnant or with a young child. That’s NUTS (I’m not a doctor, but I have a few in the family). She’s chosen, and paid for, a relatively demanding career path, one in which she’s made a ton of sacrifices (tuition, long study hours instead of getting drunk with all the other Freshmen in the dorm), and there is some more sacrifice yet to be made before she’s established. If your BIL wanted kids now, he should have chosen a women not working on an MD.
Given that, they’ll probably do fine. An engineer should be able to do a lot better than $60k given a few years in his career. She’ll start making real money in two or so. And is really three away from “kids now.” It wouldn’t surprise me if in five to ten years, they had twice as much income. But kids now would be a distraction from both of them - and that distraction at this point in careers could really hit their wallets and house, kids, and student loans would be really tight.
From what I remember from househunting, 1/3 baths are what I always thought of as “powder rooms.”
They’re usually little nooks off of the main entryway with an end-table, sometimes a bit of a shelf for useful things for guests, and a sink. Most often found in conjunction with a cloak-closet and in houses with things like “formal dining rooms” and “foyers.”
I have never heard of a 1/3 bath, and I used to sell real estate. That would just be a sink to me. I’d always thought of a powder room as a half-bath, sink and toilet. Otherwise I guess you could call the kitchen a 1/3 bath. Different places, though, have different terminology.
This is baffling to me - I remember when it was my parents and us four siblings in a house with just two bedrooms and 1 bath and somehow we all survived the experience. Yes, two parents in one bedroom and four kids in the other (we were small at the time). We never had more than 3 bedrooms growing up and, again, we all survived the experience.
They already had a house - why the HELL would they need to buy another one before having a kid? Before having two kids? Which would still give each kid his/her own room.
If the woman in this couple is out of med school by a couple years then she’s already, what, 30? Waiting a few years means she enters into the rapidly dropping fertility years.
If a woman wants kids she really should plan to start by 30. Sure, there are women who naturally conceive in their 40’s, but the odds of conceiving start dropping rapidly. Unless she WANTS to play fertility roulette with the “assisted conception” industry. That will cost as much as their new house did.
Well, I guess it’s nice that SIL agrees with her parents’ parenting choices, but… wow. That’s… a little scary. Thanks for sharing. That was a very interesting story.
They can wait a couple of years (and my sister would certainly like to wait more than that), but Broomstick names part of the issue. And then there’s that with the path my sister has chosen (research-oriented, hospital specialist) there is basically no good time. She estimates based on her colleagues that fellowship is the only window where she might have a little less work.
In Spain people got around that kind of limits by overvaluing houses. You’re buying a 100K€ flat, brand new, and you want to borrow 120K€? OK, we’ll value it at 14.4K€.
Eventually the caps got removed, weeeh… and then you’d get people combining the overvaluation with a loan which was 120% of the value given.
When people with 120% loans started complaining that “OMG, the new low prices mean I now owe more than my house is worth,” the response of “uh, you’ve been owing more than your house was worth since the day you signed that mortgage, so shut up and pass the salt” appears to have been universal.
No, it had a full toilet, but a teensy, tiny sink! (stoopit typo) My dad built an itty-bitty bathroom in the basement -just enough space for the commode and one of the smallest sinks I’d ever seen in my life. It was great when we were playing in the basement, but it really didn’t help a lot when the 5 kids were trying to get bathed and ready for bed every night…
Sure she can. I personally wouldn’t advise it (well, I wouldn’t generally advise having kids anyway for most folks, so take that with a whole salt lick), but people do it all the time and it seems to work out well enough. My husband works for a residency program, and they had such a pregnancy epidemic last summer I was scared for him to drink a soda from the vending machine lest it be contaminated with whatever was in the water over there. Attendings and residents alike, pretty much all the women were pregnant, trying to get pregnant, or had just had babies, and pretty much all the married men had pregnant wives. Actually, in one case, both situations applied–one of the third-years is married to one of the second-years, and they had a little girl in August. At least one of the students they’ve interviewed for next year’s class is pregnant, though I can’t remember if she’s due shortly before or shortly after the year starts. One guy DoctorJ went through residency with had two kids during their 3-year residency.
Of course, both the program he went through and the one he works for are pretty benign programs to start with, and in the last 10-15 years there’s been a huge shift in medical training toward a healthier work/life balance. There are better provisions for parental leave and vacation time, and of course the new-ish work hours rules that limit you to 80 hours a week.
Yeah, I typed out a response to that myself CCL but then decided it was not worth it. Not all residency programs are alike-my sister finished with a 40 hour work week and was the only resident that did not have her baby during residency. And she publishes and does research. And she’s also chief resident. She signed for a 32 hour a week job for a full time salary & benefits at a prestigious hospital in Boston and is planning to have a baby in the next few years. But by SDMB standards she’s ruining her careerfinancialinstabilityOMG.
Aside from this, I think it’s pretty insane to splash a sibling’s financial history (esp. one that hits all the SDMB nerve points like parents helping with education, big houses etc.) all over the internet. OP, are you sure this just isn’t about the fact that your parents emotionally and financially support your sister because she’s a doctor?
anu-la, thanks. That’s a good point. I should definitely at least not have put numbers. If this were a completely secure anonymous identity I wouldn’t feel bad about it (hey, isn’t the internet FOR complaining anonymously about things that bother one?), but as it is I don’t feel that this is a completely secure identity.
(But no, I don’t think it’s about that; I just got overwhelmed by realizing what was going on at first. My parents are scrupulously fair in their nagging, I mean, support, it’s just that my husband and I can’t deal with the psychic cost and tend not to take them up on it. We can start another thread on that if you would like )
I don’t know if it’s necessarily bragging but more of a disbelief at what some people think is important. You probably didn’t have to borrow 100,000 dollars from your parents to buy your house and you didn’t have to not have any children to afford it. It’s the mindset that you can’t have children if you don’t have a large house.
There’s nothing wrong with a large house if you can afford it.