Single Moms Pay the Price by Sacrificing Their Life to Their Job

August 4, 2008

Single Moms Pay the Price by Sacrificing Their Life to Their Job

As a single mom you are required to go above and beyond the call of the job duty. Raising kids requires significant chunks of time too. What about time for yourself? With the imagination and skills many single moms possess, they should consider creating their own business so they can have more earning power and time flexibility.

Most of us were taught to have a career or job of some kind in order to make money. The most common way is to work for someone else as an employee. As an employee you expect to receive some kid of pay for the work you do, by the hour, week, or month. One challenge for a single mom is to balance to time required for the job and the time needed to take care of our kids and ourselves. This results in single moms who pay the price by sacrificing their life to their job.

Using the term balance must have been coined by employers who wanted you to think that somehow a single parent or any parent employee could have a personal life while working 40 plus hours per week for the company. Any single mom with kids and a day job knows that the term “balance” means taking little or no time for yourself and the bare minimum for your kids if you expect to keep your job and get any kind of raise or promotion.

People who work for a paycheck and bonus think that they are going to be able to become rich if they work for a company long enough and get the promotions and raises they hope for. The pattern is to get some kind of degree or training, get the first job, then a raise, then a better job, then try to get a promotion. When this happens maybe you think you can hire out all the extra work like house cleaning, gardening and laundry, and get more time for yourself.

Doing all the extras for these rewards requires time. This can be very demanding for a single mom since you have to add in all the kid duties to that plan. If you don’t have a good helper or the other parent around it could get stressful.

We think raises and promotions will make our life financially better. What we fail to recognize is that as we earn more, we spend more. Single moms sacrifice their life to the job. They miss getting to know and spend time with their kids. Additionally inflation kills the value of the raise and devaluation of our currency makes matters even worse. You can work a lifetime as an employee and still be in the same or worse financial situation you were in when you started. What do you do when your kids need to go to college? How do you pay for that added expense?

If you take away the pay incentives, the bonuses, bigger and better degrees, or a promotion, what is the motivation to press on? You guessed it. There is none. An employee is in always trading precious time for money, for their entire life until retirement. The only hope is that there is enough money saved so they don’t end up on welfare. No other way exists for the employee.

However, I’ve seen people just say no to that thought process. It is possibly an advantage for some single moms and women. Some are less inclined to put up with the career game and venture out on their own to create highly successful businesses.

Being employed has worked in the past for many people including either our parents or our grandparents. But times are changing and it may not be a viable method today. The problem is that no one is teaching a different approach. It’s up to you to learn more about finances and new ways of generating money so you don’t end up in the poor farm. This is especially so for single mothers, who have dependents to protect, provide and care for.

Sure, you can love the work you do but maybe you don’t want to do that much of it. Maybe you want to choose how to plan your day. Maybe you want to take the summer off and vacation with your children. Maybe you want to go to the after school soccer game without tons of begging and planning. Maybe you want to be able to have more of a say in when and where you get the job done. Maybe you’re not into being there every day to make sure the boss sees you at your desk. Maybe you are tired of waiting to retire. Maybe you don’t want to work at an unfulfilling job until you are 75. Or maybe it suits you just fine. If so, you’re very lucky.

If not, would you consider alternatives? Single moms don’t have to pay the price by sacrificing their life to their job. There are alternatives and single moms who succeed in their own leveraged businesses can call their own shots. It requires more effort in the short term but in the long term the benefits can far surpass the effort. All single moms and parents that want to have more time with their kids and self owe it to themselves to learn other ways to make a living besides working for a paycheck.

Lana Hawkins is the author of Mom Pays for
College blog. If you’re a single mom that needs to finance an education get the free audio and a detailed report covering many ideas on how single moms can earn money for college. Go to Free Report and Audio - How Single Moms Can Pay for College
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Tags : single moms, business success, your own business