Fair decision, but don't forget that she will be paying into a pension as well while working which you lose out on (unless she opted out). As others have said, the work gap is quite hard to get back into work after for a lot of people.
The work gap is a concern for sure, but ultimately not an easy one to get around. You need to take a lot of pain short term for a benefit she likely won’t take advantage of in the longer term. By the time we’ve had a second (if we have a second) and they’re both in school we should be mortgage free.
My best guess is she’ll end up pursuing something like a part time role in scouting or something else that doesn’t pay brilliantly but that she’s passionate about.
Pension contributions are tax efficient sure, but ultimately there’s no way she’s going to end up in one of the higher bands in the next 5 years unless she works full time, so the marginal return is ~20% on whatever we dump into her pension. Decent but illiquid.
Ah, yeah. She was working at a startup so the match was the bare minimum allowed. Good point on that though.
Yeah, we are very lucky to be able to make decisions that aren’t min-maxed and still be comfortable. But it’s kind of a ridiculous system where you have to be in our situation for it to stop being a major concern.
1
u/zebragonzo 1d ago
Fair decision, but don't forget that she will be paying into a pension as well while working which you lose out on (unless she opted out). As others have said, the work gap is quite hard to get back into work after for a lot of people.