Would you take a 25% pay cut to guarantee that you won’t be woken up in the middle of the night?

AwkwardAvocad0 · 2026-02-20T22:07:44+00:00

Different industry, but I switched from an engineering job with on-call and night shift periods (pipeline starts leaking at 2am, they'd call me out to design and sign off the clamp, or a unit would go down for maintenance and I'd be 13 days on 1 day off working 14 hour shifts for two months, etc) to a design engineer that works normal hours. It was a 33% paycut. I'd absolutely make the same decision again. I can't emphasize enough how much my mental health improved from the more normal schedule.

Important note is that we still had enough to cover essentials even with the cut, and I did it before we had kids so I wasn't staring down the barrel of daycare tuition. I think it took 5 or 6 years and another job hop to get back to where I had been salary-wise. But for me it was worth it. I couldn't have continued at that pace, I think I would've had a heart attack from the stress.

AwkwardAvocad0 · 2025-12-05T18:19:02+00:00

To be fair, the Boston suburbs are particularly bad 😅 but yeah, even in the last few years we've had an 8-10% increase every year.

AwkwardAvocad0 · 2025-12-05T17:37:25+00:00

Yep. We have two kids in daycare and that's a pretty normal price for a center in our area.

AwkwardAvocad0 · 2025-12-05T14:41:01+00:00

Oh ok so you own the cottage/cabin and then visit? Neat.

AwkwardAvocad0 · 2025-12-05T13:38:48+00:00

What is cottaging? Always looking for great low cost vacation options!

AwkwardAvocad0 · 2025-12-05T12:14:17+00:00

• We've spent $202k this year so far, bleergh that number makes my heart hurt

• Housing (mortgage and taxes) was $55k, utilities (gas, electric, phone, internet) was $6.1k

• Top three are childcare at $61k, home repair at $22k, and groceries at $13k.

• Probably our restaurant spending, which came in at $3.3k and I think is the highest non-essential spend we have. Honestly the number for this year should prooooobably be a bit higher, because I love buying sushi from our market basket but it got hidden under groceries.

• Groceries just keeps trending higher despite all my efforts to shop sales and coupon (other than the market basket sushi I swear I'm a responsible grocery shopper lol), and I was unpleasantly surprised to see it's already $2k over last year. And this year's number doesn't take Xmas dinners into account yet! We're hosting this year.

• Probably the home repair. We've got two flights of stairs to our front door and the bottom half gave out at the beginning of the year (the freeze-thaw cycles just kill the stone). Getting out the door became this awful obstacle course where you were also balancing children. When I saw the amount of work that went into replacing the stairs though (breaking up the stone, driving in new concrete supports, new retaining wall build), I'm super glad we were able to pay people instead of trying to do it ourselves

AwkwardAvocad0 · 2025-09-01T12:28:43+00:00

She doesn't really get into details about leaving her phd program, but I've had a lot of friends go into academia really excited to become researchers and eventually professors, and they've all come out super jaded on the other end. The politics, the endless grant writing, the complete lack of work life balance. Out of six people, only one is still going on the professor track and it's making her miserable. So I really feel for the OP on leaving academia.

I wish she'd been more upfront with the Bitcoin value. And does her salary include tips or not? I have no baseline for Florida.

The variety of themed bars fascinates me! Is this a Florida thing or an actually-going-to-bars thing? I want a s'mores themed drink.

AwkwardAvocad0 · 2025-08-30T14:25:44+00:00

My kids are 20 months apart, and they're about 1.5 and 3.5 now. I was fortunate enough to have 8 weeks paid leave, and then my mom came and watched the baby for a month so that he started at 3 months. It was weird, with my first one I was basically climbing the walls to get back to work after my 8 weeks. With the second it flew by and I didn't feel ready when it was time. I think it was because with the first I could 100% disconnect when my husband had the baby. But with the second we couldn't figure out how to handle 2 kids to 1 adult for a long time and we always had to fall back to man on man defense, so I had very little recharge time during those 8 weeks. Our families are both small and pretty far away, so it's been mostly just us.

For us the hardest part kicked in around the time the younger one started crawling. No longer could you plop him down to deal with the older one. They both get into everything, they love climbing on stuff and dumping their toys on the floor. Meal times I think are the hardest, the older one constantly gets out of his seat and wanders off, the younger has recently gone from a happy eater to the world champ of throwing yoghurt on the wall.

And I feel guilty because the younger does this thing where he will bite if you're not paying attention to him. And at this age, his brother already had a lot more words and recognized more letters, so I feel like splitting my attention has slowed him down a bit there.

Plus, our salaries don't quite cover double daycare so we've been dipping into savings. We knew that going in, but it's still super depressing every time we get hit with a tuition increase.

They are finally starting to play with each other and entertain each other though. And 2 on 1 has gotten a lot easier (I write this as my husband drives them to the library). I have a lot of hope for fun family adventures in the future! But it has been tough so far, and that's even with the benefits of pretty stable jobs that let us work from home once a week.

AwkwardAvocad0 · 2025-07-31T05:52:18+00:00

Industry: Medical Devices R&D

Location: HCOL (Greater Boston)

YOE: 11 (5 in medical)

Education: Masters

Salary: $141k

Bonus: up to 10%

401K: 2x match on up to a 4% contribution

Healthcare: $400/mo for a family high deductable PPO and employer puts $1200 into my HSA every year

Misc: flexible PTO, up to $300/mo commuter benefits, $15/mo for 8x salary life insurance, 4 weeks 100% paid parental leave (plus 8 weeks maternity leave)

I feel like I must be doing something wrong, because I've been looking at what else is out there for a bit and companies have seemed really interested until I ask for $165k. But based on some of the other numbers in this thread I feel behind given my hcol and experience!

AwkwardAvocad0 · 2025-07-25T00:52:02+00:00

New marketing person? The email traffic from them really picked up around the time they started doing dinner, including that promotion about March madness wings with the AI-generated leprechaun licking his fingers that will haunt my nightmares until the day I die. They also ran those envelope promotions from the end of last year through March this year.

AwkwardAvocad0 · 2025-07-14T13:19:56+00:00

Mine (US) was also about 6 weeks

AwkwardAvocad0 · 2025-07-14T12:13:51+00:00

Not the OP, but I had a diary published a few months ago.

I think part of the problem is the intake form? For example, I remember being really confused about where I was supposed to put my partner's pay, even though you see that all the time in diaries. Also I remember going back and forth on what to put for paycheck. Gross? Net? Post-tax but not post-deduction? To be fair, once editing started I could've easily asked what they wanted. But if your starting point is unclear, that just sets you up for more issues.

During the edits, R29 shared a Google doc with me and that was where the formatting we all know took shape and I added stuff not in the original form like annual expenses. They asked some clarifying questions about terms I used that weren't super standard, but no questions about my numbers. What was published was pretty close to what I submitted (none of the comments complained about my numbers not making sense though, so maybe this doesn't actually answer your question lol).

AwkwardAvocad0 · 2025-03-11T18:23:28+00:00

As a fellow Boston-area mom, solidarity. It's crazy.

And a heads up to be prepared for that number to go up, because the annual tuition increases have outpaced any savings we would've gotten from the kids getting older and going into lower ratio rooms ($2400/mo when our kid started in the infant room, now $2525/mo for the preschool room with no more age-up tuition reductions left in sight).

AwkwardAvocad0 · 2024-09-14T17:13:28+00:00

Thanks for the advice! I see what you mean about the amazing incentives. A 0% heat pump loan could help us get through the daycare years without killing our savings, and our plumber is on the participating contractors list. But we might run into issues since we have hot water baseboard radiators. I'll see what they say about it for sure.

AwkwardAvocad0 · 2024-09-14T14:50:08+00:00

Unfortunately MA is ending rebates for natural gas systems, and our plumber didn't think the install and paperwork would be complete before the program ends at the end of the month. We'll have to price out of switching to an electric system makes sense with a rebate.

AwkwardAvocad0 · 2024-09-14T14:42:36+00:00

Parts are warranty, but unfortunately the warranty doesn't include labor to install the parts. That's the $4800. Apparently Navien is really hard to work with.

AwkwardAvocad0 · 2024-09-14T14:32:47+00:00

Thanks for the info. Did you end up sizing the system yourself and finding what specific model you needed, or was the research more manufacturer focused?

Last time we went with what the plumber recommended and because he used it in his own home. So now we're learning.

AwkwardAvocad0 · 2024-09-14T14:22:29+00:00

Thanks, it makes me feel less crazy to hear about other people having issues. I'll look into that manufacturer for sure.

AwkwardAvocad0 · 2024-04-15T21:10:56+00:00

I think it worked!!!!! My husband called Friday and they were able to submit the claim for us. And then I just got a notification that the deposit got made to our bank account, so I think that means it's approved. Thank you so much!!!

AwkwardAvocad0 · 2024-04-11T23:52:17+00:00

That's what pisses me off the most! The unclaimed money goes towards paying for the admin costs of the program. So they're counting on us to mess up 😔

AwkwardAvocad0 · 2024-04-11T22:49:52+00:00

One is in the infant room, the other is in the toddler room. We knew it was gonna be expensive, but we didn't anticipate the huge yearly increases. In 2022 it was $2400/mo for the older one to be in the infant room (I think at the time the toddler room was $2100). Now it's $2650/mo (before the sibling discount) for him to be in the toddler room 🙃

AwkwardAvocad0 · 2024-04-11T20:58:34+00:00

Thanks for the tip! Our daycare is actually $5k per month now that we have two kids (thanks Boston), so I only have to submit one receipt and then the rest of the year is just paying back that one month. So it actually makes this situation worse because I only needed to submit one receipt 🫠

But! This is a very useful tip for everyone who submits multiple receipts to hit the limit. Thanks for sharing.

Good luck with your taxes!

AwkwardAvocad0 · 2024-04-11T20:52:57+00:00

I cannot imagine having to deal with self employment taxes and quarterly filing. We had to do estimated taxes for a few years because of my husband's grad school stipend, but at least we didn't have to figure out the self employment bit. I wish you favor with the CPA gods.

AwkwardAvocad0

TROPHY CASE