Can You Afford to Work Outside the Home?

Can you afford to work for peanuts?

Telling people what I do for a living normally evokes a stream of responses such as, ‘That’s not a proper job,’ or ‘You need a job with benefits,’ or ‘You can’t afford to work like that.’ Most times though, the conversation ends up boiling down to something along the lines of “but you must take whichever job you can get, even if the pay is low.” On this point, I disagree very strongly for a few reasons:

How do You Know if You Can Afford to Work

Believe it or not, your job actually costs you money. You might not realize it, but taking a low-paying job can actually end up costing you more than it is worth to drive to that mundane, mind-numbing cube farm each weekday (the cost of your sanity was not taken into account for this exercise ). In South Africa, the average wage or salary on offer ranges between ZAR2000 and ZAR3500 ($367 to $514) a month. Yes! Not bi-weekly or weekly. Monthly.

Those figures may sound absolutely pathetic to you for a months’ worth of hard work, but that is the sad reality here. Most employers seem to think staff can exist on fresh air (but more about that in another post to follow soon)… Many people don’t realize that it actually costs you money to work, to have a job. They are under the impression that you simply arrive at work, put in your set hours for the day and head home when they are done for the day.

Transportation is just one of the few expenses to factor in when taking on a job. Whether you have your own vehicle or you rely on public transportation, you will still need to sit down and calculate whether you can really afford to work. The average person in South Africa spends between ZAR15 and ZAR50 ($2.18 to $7.25) a day on transportation costs. In a month which averages around 20 working days, this can range from around ZAR300 to ZAR1000 ($44 to $145).

Often I hear working moms saying that they don’t have time to prepare lunches for themselves or their families at home. This results in each member of the family having to buy a lunch at a cafeteria or fast food joint. The average bought lunch can cost anywhere between ZAR30 and ZAR80 ($4.35 and $11.60) per person. For a family of four, this can amount to anywhere between ZAR2400 and ZAR6400 a month ($348 and $928).

Many people have to adhere to particular dress codes in their workplace. This can also cost quite a substantial amount of money, especially if your company does not subsidize your work clothing.

Child care is another expense that needs to be taken into consideration before taking on a relatively low-paying job, because this is cited as the number one expense of many working parents. Full day child care can range between ZAR1500 and ZAR3000 ($218 and $435) a month for children 6 and under.

Still Think You Can Afford to Work

When taking these expenses into account, one definitely needs to rethink forcing yourself or spouse into taking a low-paying or below average position away from the home, because many times it will actually cost you more than you earn to take on that job. Just taking the abovementioned figures and expenses into account should be enough of an eye-opener in itself.

Many folk tell me that they have to work in order to pay for ‘the little extra luxuries in life.’ I am more than willing to bet that in most cases, they haven’t thought it through or stopped to do the calculations to see if they or their spouse really can afford to work at that low-paying job.

Right now, I earn a little less on paper than some folk do as a writer and citizen journalist for Natural News, but at least I know that by working from home, I do not have to hand over my hard-earned cash to expenses such as corporate clothing or ridiculously high transport costs.

‘”Normal” is waking up and getting dressed in clothes that you have to buy for work, then driving through heavy, stressful traffic in a car that you bought (and are still paying for) in order to get to the job that you need to pay for the corporate clothing, car and house that you have to leave empty all day just so that you and your family can actually afford to live in it.’

Still think you can afford to work ?