How This Mompreneur Cut Down on Child-Care Costs Trying to get a business off the ground is hard enough. This entrepreneur found a way to better manage her business to fit her children's schedule.

It costs a lot of money to be an entrepreneur. Somehow, I make my personal finances work while building a startup and taking care of two kids, but I've noticed an increasingly expensive pattern that I would like to change in 2015: the amount of time, energy and money I put into figuring out how to care for my kids outside of school.

The average working American gets two weeks of vacation; entrepreneurs like us usually take none. Typical workdays end at 5 p.m., but entrepreneurs keep going until the work gets done. Schools, meanwhile, follow their own schedules. When you include holidays, spring and winter breaks, teacher conference days, snow days and sick days, most of us have to figure out an annual eight weeks of child care beyond the work vacations we're allotted. And that doesn't include regular after-school care.

In 2014, my children's father and I spent at least $10,000 on child care to cover gaps between school and work schedules, not including what we had to shell out for the long summer break.