Holidays in the sun off for now

This time last year, Jonathan Lockyer and his family were in Fiji enjoying a holiday funded by his high-paying management role at a global recruitment company.

By December, he was redundant and, despite his best efforts, he hasn't been able to land another position.

Fortunately Jonathan and wife Ana had savings after working in Britain and bought their Devonport home with only a modest mortgage. But the renovations are postponed indefinitely and the Lockyers are having to dip into the savings that were to fund the improvements.

The couple have three young children and Ana, a chartered accountant, was previously at home with them fulltime.

Now she's taken a three-month contract to bring in some income, while Jonathan balances the childcare and housekeeping with intensive efforts to find a new role. He's been offered jobs with packages worth half what he was on but says he's not ready to take such a step back.

Jonathan says being a house husband has enhanced his time-management skills and given him insight into the stresses unique to the role.

Walking the kids to and from school or doing the shopping, he sees "a hell of a lot more dads out doing the same thing".

They joke about setting up a bar outside school so they can get together when collecting the kids, and sometimes lunch together, enjoying the blokes' version of mums' coffee groups.

But he misses the intellectual challenge of working outside the home. "To go from pitching campaigns and delivering presentations to making horses out of cardboard boxes takes a lot of getting used to."