daycare-vs-stay-home

daycare-vs-stay-home is a cursor rule for Cursor from mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills. It costs 111 tokens per session (1,263 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A financial comparison of one parent working and paying for childcare versus staying home. It includes take-home pay, taxes, work costs, childcare, and the longer-term effect on earnings and retirement benefits.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to compare full-time work, staying home, part-time work, and different childcare arrangements.
Why use it?
It replaces the misleading comparison between childcare and gross salary with a fuller view of the money gained or lost. It also shows costs that appear later, such as slower career growth or returning to work after a break.

Cursor rule for Cursor

Written for Cursor: a Cursor rule (.mdc). Also seen: positional $N argument.

Needs its repository: it runs a file that does not travel with it, so clone the repository first. The line is python3 scripts/daycare_vs_stay_home.py --income 62000 --daycare 1600.

Good fit Use it to compare full-time work, staying home, part-time work, and different childcare arrangements.

Compare 6 cursor rules from other repositories ↓
About the project

PM Skills is a collection of plain-Markdown instructions that teach AI assistants structured methods for handling professional, personal, and life-admin tasks. People use it with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Cursor, Codex, and other supported agents for work such as writing product requirements, reviewing documents, or planning difficult situations.

mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills · 1,357 stars · on GitHub · mohitagw15856.github.io

Install

Getting it into your agent

It runs from inside its repository, so the clone comes first — what it calls does not travel with the file alone.

Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills
agentmods
npx agentmods add rules/mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills/daycare-vs-stay-home

Made for: Cursor.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for daycare-vs-stay-home

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/rules/mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills/daycare-vs-stay-home/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/rules/mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills/daycare-vs-stay-home)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/rules/mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills/daycare-vs-stay-home"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/rules/mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills/daycare-vs-stay-home/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for daycare-vs-stay-home

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/rules/mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills/daycare-vs-stay-home"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/rules/mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills/daycare-vs-stay-home.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 111 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 1,263 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00111 $0.01263
Opus 5 $0.00056 $0.00632
Sonnet 5 $0.00022 $0.00253
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00126

Measured 9d ago against content hash 5de8eccfc3bd, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

daycare-vs-stay-home scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 9d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

exports/cursor/pm-calculators/daycare-vs-stay-home/daycare-vs-stay-home.mdc · 81 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 81 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Daycare vs Stay-Home Skill

"Daycare eats my whole salary" is usually computed wrong twice: it compares childcare against gross pay (marginal taxes were eating part of that anyway), and it prices exactly one year of a decision whose costs live in the following decade — the raises not compounded, the re-entry discount, the retirement match not collected. This skill runs both sides honestly: what working nets this year, and what stepping out costs over the horizon. Then it hands the decision back, because the spreadsheet gets a vote, not a veto.

What This Skill Produces

  • This year's ledger — second income minus marginal tax, childcare, and work costs, plus the match: the real net, from the script
  • The horizon view — earnings forgone over the years out, and the re-entry salary vs. the never-left trajectory
  • The middle options — part-time, one-parent-flex, cheaper-care mixes — sketched against the same ledger
  • The decision sheet — money on both sides plus the non-financials, with their explicit permission to win

Required Inputs

Ask for these if not provided:

  • The second earner's income — and which parent's leaving is actually on the table (the framing "second income" is doing work; make it explicit)
  • Childcare cost — per child per month, the real local quote; number of kids and their ages (the cost cliff at school age is the model's built-in expiry date)
  • The marginal tax rate — marginal, not average; flag it as verify-yours, and note childcare tax credits/subsidies are jurisdiction-specific and often large
  • Career shape — expected raises, how re-entry works in their field (the default penalty is a placeholder; fields differ wildly), and the years-out being considered

Programmatic Helper

python3 scripts/daycare_vs_stay_home.py --income 62000 --daycare 1600
python3 scripts/daycare_vs_stay_home.py --income 62000 --daycare 1600 --kids 2 --marginal-tax 28 --years-out 4 --json

Deterministic. The re-entry penalty default (10%) is a labeled placeholder — research varies widely; set it to the field's reality or treat it as a sensitivity axis.

Read the full file on GitHub · 81 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 9d ago First seen · 81 lines · 111 tokens per session scan A 5de8eccfc3bd

Subscribe to this mod's changes

daycare-vs-stay-home is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills (1,357 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 111 tokens to every session and 1,263 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.