Uncomplicated Momming

I started this blog in July of 2024. I had just gone back to work after having twins, and if I’m being honest, it was part emotional processing, part documentation, and part deeply optimistic fantasy that I could replace my income writing on the internet. Eighteen months later, I have made approximately five dollars. The joke writes itself.

But here’s what those eighteen months actually taught me: people don’t want the answer. They want their answer. The one they ask for themselves, usually anonymously, in a Facebook group where the same question was answered three times last week with genuinely helpful responses. They scroll past all of it. They type their question anyway. And I have feelings about the anonymous post feature specifically, but that’s a different essay for a different day.

What I’ve been thinking about lately isn’t the blog, though. It’s money. Specifically, how aggressively the math has stopped working for regular people — and how we’re all walking around pretending otherwise.

The Number Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud

You’ve probably seen the post. It floats through TikTok and Instagram periodically, usually accompanied by someone’s stunned face in the thumbnail: to live comfortably in the United States, you need to be making at least $130,000. Maybe more. And the comment sections are always the same mix of people who find that number laughable and people who find it insulting because they make $130K and still feel broke.

Both groups are right. Because it’s not really about one number.

Nationally, a single adult with no children needs around $107,000 per year in pre-tax income just to stay within the 50/30/20 budget structure — the widely used framework that allocates half your income to necessities, 30% to discretionary spending, and 20% to savings or debt. Add one child, and a two-parent household needs nearly $194,000. Add a second child, it jumps to over $233,000. Purdue Exponent

Let that sit for a second.

The U.S. median household income is just over $80,000, according to the most recent Census Bureau data. CNBCMeanwhile, working families of four now need roughly $9,360 more than they did just one year ago to maintain a comfortable, sustainable budget. SmartAsset We are not dealing with gradual drift. We are dealing with a structural gap that keeps widening.

Here in Colorado, a family of four earning the state median of about $147,000 still doesn’t meet the $273,000 benchmark that researchers consider “comfortable” for this state. Moneywise A couple in Boulder making $220,000 combined is reporting they feel financially stretched. Not struggling in a crisis sense, but stretched — the way where you’re doing everything right and still can’t get ahead.

The Part That Gets Conveniently Left Out

When people talk about household income, they’re usually talking about two incomes pooled together. Which is a perfectly fine way to live, but it papers over what happens when you’re one income. Or when your gross pay sounds reasonable until you subtract federal taxes, state taxes, FICA, and health insurance. And then — the thing that doesn’t get talked about enough — childcare.

Colorado families pay well above the national average for full-time child care. The national average cost in 2024 was $13,128 per year; in Colorado, it’s $16,716 — and that’s per child. Winnie

In Denver specifically, the average monthly cost of childcare for one child is $1,574 — and families in Colorado’s 10 largest counties are spending 18% to 25% of their monthly income on child care, far above the 7% affordability benchmark set by the federal government. Dpp

I have two kids. I have done the math on what I take home after taxes and what I hand back out the door every month for childcare, and the number left over is, as I have described it to friends, laughable. Not in a self-deprecating-humble-brag way. In a genuinely “this is what we’re doing out here” way.

I recognize the financial privilege in having chosen single parenthood intentionally and in being employed and in having a career that pays above average. I’m not pretending to be in crisis. But acknowledging privilege doesn’t mean pretending the numbers make sense, because they don’t. And if they don’t make sense for someone in my position, they make even less sense for the millions of people one tier below.

The Part That Nobody Told You About the 1950s Math

The $60,000 family-of-three from fifty years ago everyone keeps referencing? That wasn’t just a different number. It was a different economic structure. One income was designed to carry a household because one income was structurally set up to do exactly that — with stable housing costs, employer-funded pensions, and healthcare that didn’t require a separate line item negotiation every year. The 50/30/20 rule itself assumes a world where 50% of your income covers genuine necessities. Child care prices in Colorado rose 29% from 2020 to 2024 alone — outpacing overall inflation, which rose 22% over the same period. Dpp That’s not inflation. That’s a category breaking.

Meanwhile, 43% of younger generations cite both the preference for financial freedom and the inability to afford children as equal reasons for not becoming parents — and in 2024, the U.S. birth rate hit an all-time low, with fewer than 1.6 children born per woman. Yahoo Finance The math isn’t discouraging parenthood; it’s doing something far more efficient. It’s making it feel irrational.

So What Do You Actually Do With This

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about income sources that don’t require me to be charming on camera or post every day or wait for Google to like my content enough to send me traffic. The side hustles I’m building — and I have a few running simultaneously because my brain won’t operate any other way — aren’t retirement plans. They’re a cushion. They’re a sanity hedge. They’re the answer to “what happens when the corporate job gets weird” that I refuse to not have.

The blog? Honestly, I’m not sure what it is right now. It’s not a revenue stream. It might be something else. A record. A place to say the things that don’t fit on a LinkedIn post. A long-form version of the Facebook comment I’d write if I were the type to do that.

But I know this: the people who keep asking the same question in the group instead of scrolling back three posts — I’ve made my peace with them. They’re not my audience. My audience is the person who already did the search, already read the threads, already knows the system isn’t set up for them, and is trying to build something anyway.

That’s who I’m writing for. That’s who this is.