Homeschooling May Be a Lot Cheaper Than You Think

By Linda Dobson

Have you ever thought about how much money you wouldn’t spend, and therefore wouldn’t have to make, if you stayed home to educate and enjoy your children? Across the nation families are realizing the cost of a paycheck – in terms of taxes, time and worth when compared to their children’s futures – is too steep. It just might pay – literally – to take a close look at the answers to several questions in The Homeschooling Book of Answers: The 101 Most Important Questions Answered By Homeschooling’s Most Respected Voices. Your job could be more expensive than you ever realized.

Homeschooling Is Much Cheaper than Public School

Speaking of expensive, let’s also consider the high cost of public education and the never-ending cries for more money to correct increasingly expensive mistakes. If you already know that the average per-pupil expenditure in American public schools now tops $7,000, you may at least want to keep closer tabs when your local school budget expands, especially after Cafi Cohen shares in The Homeschooling Book of Answers how a family she knows is providing an excellent education at home for less than $25 per child per year.

See also “Homeschooling Doesn’t Take Time, It MAKES Time“

Have you ever taken a hard look at how often the pendulum of educational fads swing back and forth, as failure in one direction sends your tax dollars flying in another direction, a direction just as likely to be abandoned as so many before it? Even when the fad is recognized as a failure, the nature of the beast necessitates that it continue for years because so much money was invested in it in the first place. You can’t throw away millions of dollars worth of textbooks and teacher training and advertising after just two years! It takes time to scrape around for the replacement. It takes many committees to study the proposed replacements and offer counter-proposals. Textbook publishers must be alerted to the replacement fad, find the writers, and get the new books to print. Taxpayers must be coerced into paying for it all.

Saving Money with Homeschooling

With more than 49 million children in grades K-12 of public schools, according to a National Center for Education Statistics estimate for 2000, imagine the dollars wasted with a system like this. Maybe it’s time for more families to check out an alternative route. Stay home and use a textbook that your child picks out. Drop it if it doesn’t work. Minimal financial damage, immediate correction. Better yet, read Mary Griffith’s, Becky Rupp’s and Wendy Priesnitz’s advice in The Homeschooling Book of Answers about how to keep the cost of homeschooling to a minimum; not one recommends purchasing textbooks – a staple of government schools’ voracious dollar appetite – at all.

Hundreds of thousands of families have proven you can live on once income in a two-income society, with enough money left over to educate the children well with homeschooling. Still other families, with a reordering of priorities and deft scheduling, have found room for homeschooling and a job for both parents. A bonus, homeschooling lends itself to immediate correction should something be wrong.

At educational bargain basement prices, and using the ideas you’ll discover in The Homeschooling Book of Answers, homeschooling could save your family a bundle. For just a little more fun, multiply that by 49 million children, and dream of the bundle it could save our nation.

For more information about this and Linda’s many other homeschooling books, please visit this page on our blog.

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