Any stay-at-home mom, or dad, will tell you that their “job” is just as (if not more) difficult than that of their working spouse. We agree! Whether a stay-at-home parent is caring for an infant, a toddler, or a teenager, there are a multitude of job responsibilities that are carried out on a daily basis – and, all without sick or personal days, bonuses, and zero dollars in overtime pay. For a stay-at-home parent that has more than one child, in more than one age bracket, the daily responsibilities could look something like this:
- Get everyone ready and off to school
- Feed the baby
- Load of laundry
- Put the baby down for a nap
- Clean the house
- Chauffeur the kids to practice, dance lessons, or a friend’s house
- Run errands
- Grocery shopping
- Figure out who “I don’t know” is & how they spent another $86.00 on music/games for the smartphone
- Start dinner
- Oh yeah… and be a partner, friend, loving spouse when their husband or wife gets home
These are tasks, items to complete in a day and then again the next day. Most families do not consider what would happen to the family dynamic if the stay-at-home parent were no longer there – let’s face it, this is not a pleasant topic.
In addition to being a spouse, a parent, a counselor, an organizer, and a member of their community – a stay-at-home parent brings an economic value to the household. What they do each day would have a cost, in real dollars or opportunity cost, if they were no longer there to do it. As has been discussed in other articles and posts – life insurance is designed to replace someone’s economic value, the contribution of their salary to the family corporate, no different than a working spouse who receives a W2. Salary.com has an interesting graphic that shows the equivalent salary of a stay-at-home mom: $112,962 annually1.
Families should always consider the amount of life insurance they have in place on the stay at home parent. Unfortunately, we find that a majority of households have no life insurance for this person. A new Insuring Income client-family that we worked with in the early part of 2014, came to us via our instant life insurance quote tool. The wife is the working spouse and the husband is the stay-at-home parent, taking care of their children ages 13, 9, 6. Now in their late 30s, they had made the decision to purchase additional life insurance, on both of them. Their justification was, “if something happened to either one of us, it would be devastating of course… but life would have to continue. We need to make sure the other can keep the family going, in the ways that we would want them to.”
In the end, both of our clients added an additional $1,000,000 in 30 year level term insurance to their life insurance portfolio. Side note: they were able to cover the monthly cost of one of the policies for less money than was spent on the music/games for the smartphone (yes, it was a real example).
If you are considering life insurance, you should also consider the life insurance needs of your stay-at-home spouse.
To get quotes on instant quotes on life insurance: click here
To contact a member of our team with a question, to begin a discussion, or request a life insurance review via email: click here
To arrange a call to discuss life insurance: click here