On top of all of that, my wife and I each work outside the home. She works 8 hour days each weekend in customer service at Walmart while I do the daycare. Until recently, I was working 34 hours during the week as a cashier at Walmart, 4:30pm to midnight, while she did the daycare. I had to go on leave because my wife had a major health crisis and couldn't handle the kids without me being home. Even when I return, I will only be able to work 16 hours, which means that we will have to pay for COBRA health insurance. Fewer hours and more expenses aren't exactly the way to be successful.

We bought a house to do the daycare, and our projections showed that if we were full, we could easily make the payments. Of course, we weren't full for the first 14 months we were open, which meant we had to work outside the home, which didn't bring in as much money as daycare would have. The house has also proven to be a money pit, needing major repairs to plumbing and windows, and putting off fixing carpet and light fixtures. It is also not airtight and very expensive to heat and cool.

My wife has serious health problems stemming from 2 major, and about 15 minor, surgeries for cancer, plus several knee surgeries that led to serious infections. She has fibromyalgia, and she needs a knee replacement. She shouldn't be working at all. Again, we thought that the daycare would provide enough income so that we wouldn't have to work outside the home and I could take care of her. But that's not how things worked out.

Nobody was honest about how much it costs to open a daycare. The costs to get licensed alone were several thousand dollars in order to upgrade the house. We have maxed out more credit cards than I care to admit, and we aren't making the payments on most of them. I wish we had never opened for business, because it's not worth it.

The honest truth is that doing daycare is killing both of us, since we have to work outside the home in order to make ends meet. We can't kick out the clients that are on assistance, because that is the only money we can consistently count on receiving. We can't close the daycare completely, because then we would lose the house. Our credit is so trashed from opening the daycare and getting behind on our mortgage and credit cards from not filling our spots (and medical crises) that we will likely never recover. I am planning on filing for bankruptcy in fall 2018 and somehow rise from the ashes.

There are just so many things that have gone wrong with our experience that I wish we were still in our leaky mobile home with broken air conditioner and black mold working 40 hour weeks.

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