Actually, I haven’t been working for the last 3 years. We got married right after she had started her master’s program and I was 1 year in to my bachelor’s degree. I graduate in April. We’ll end up with the 14k student loan that she took out before we started dating, but otherwise we’ve been living on her salary of a little less than 40k. It helped that I worked before college and had some savings, but we drive 10 year-old cars and don’t do anything that costs much money.
As for the after-school hours, she rarely has to put any time outside of her 7:15-2:45 contract time. She gets about two hours each day (between her prep period and lunch) that enable her to keep up on her grading, etc. After her first year of teaching, there hasn’t been a lot of prep that she needs to do.
40 grand isn’t spectacular but its not terrible survival money for two people. Sounds like you’re living within your means and that helps.
Honestly I mostly hope she teaches out of a love of teaching more than to collect a paycheck. Most of my teachers were the same teachers who taught my parents and that was a true love of teaching.