Women Out Earning Men

I saw this link from MSN showing that less men are bothered by their wives earning more money. I see this phenomenon among many of my friends where the woman out earns the man (or the woman will soon out earn the man once she finishes her education).

Here's some interesting quotes from the article and my thoughts:

"Just 12 percent of men surveyed said they’d mind if their wife earned more than they do, and in general men seemed happy to share the breadwinner role." It seems silly to mind someone bringing home more money. C and I are always happier if the other person brings home more money, but we do joke about the times when we've each had breadwinner status.

"More than 40 percent of women say they do more than their share of housework — and 29 percent of men agree." I think I do more chores than C gives me credit for. Overall either he does more or we're equal. However now that I've become more concerned about living a purpose-filled life, I have started to do more housework.

"One quarter of men surveyed said that their wives aren’t working, but 40 percent of those men wish she did. Of the approximately 75 percent of men whose wives did work, only 5 percent wished she was at home." I want to have the opportunity to stay at home with my kids, when I have them. C thinks it would be more helpful for my personal development and for our family finances if I worked. We disagree on whether it would be better for the kids to have a mom with a successful career or a mom who stays home to take care of them.

"In fact, 35 percent of men and 40 percent of women surveyed said a key benefit of having a spouse make money is that it alleviates the pressure of being the only financial provider." This is part of C's worry. He also is worried that I will be bored at home and call him all the time. I agree that it's possible I'll be bored at home. When I work from home, I do call him a lot since I miss the social interaction I normally have with my co-workers.

I found this to be an interesting, although unsurprising article. I found the statistics most interesting since I like to compare my viewpoints with others.

Fighting With My Spouse On Spending Money

This past weekend, C and I had a few spats on how we do our financial management. He's been feeling that my goals (early retirement) are unrealistic and that I want to sacrifice too much for something that is unachievable. I've been feeling that he doesn't support me in my goals and has misconceptions of what my definition of retirement is.

It's killing both of us to have these arguments since we normally have a great relationship and we're on the same page for a lot of things.

I agree that I may be too extreme in some of my ideas. Hanging around the PF Blogosphere gives you a skewed point of comparison.


My husband and I agreed to put aside our differences for the weekend, but neither of us is completely happy right now with what the other person is thinking/feeling. In response to what my husband said about my goals being unrealistic, I decided to create a spreadsheet showing what I thought our financial picture would look like if we both retired early.

He was right in that we would probably only be able to semi-retire in our forties. My conservative calculations show that we probably need to generate a fraction of our current income in our forties to enable a comfortable retirement later on. I'm still tweaking the numbers, but it has shown me how important it is for us to agree and focus on our financial goals together. After I get feedback from C, I will post some more details on the assumptions I made. I'm also hoping to make the model a bit more complicated since I left out one key factor - inflation.

My husband may not believe in what I share with him from my readings, but he is a big believer of math. It's amazing what compound interest will do!

Personal Experiences

It amazes me how many personal finance blogs are now out there. It seems like every week I find a new blog that I want to subscribe to. It kinds of makes me wonder why someone would want to read my blog. My posts are not as useful, well thought out, nor frequent as other bloggers I admire.

In the end, what we're all sharing about is our personal experiences with our own writing styles and our own struggles. I struggle with an dilettante's obsession with personal finance. I've always been more of a generalist in life than a specialist and it shows in the number of extracurricular activities I was involved in while in high school, the things I studied while in college, and even to some extent my career. I wish I could be more driven to track things like Madison at MyDollarPlan or even as dedicated as Millionaire Mommy Next Door with my investment plan. I wish I could devote the time and dedication come up with a solid long term plan rather than just a general idea of where we want to be in at major milestones in our lives.

I just finished reading Your Money or Your Life: (aff link) which I checked out from the local library. I had skimmed through the book before when I was at a relative's house and saw a copy. That was back when I was first getting into personal finance and I thought that a lot of the ideas seemed pretty kooky (e.g. what are you trading your life energy for), but now it seems like a good thing to sit down and actually do the program.

I've convinced C that we should read the book together and do the exercises together since we need to do a better job of managing our finances together. I hope that C and I can read the book and finish the exercises by the end of the year.

Managing Holiday Gift Expectations

Valentine’s Day may be a holiday promoted by the greeting card industry and their subsidiaries to get us to spend more money. There are numerous ideas out there on how to save money for this upcoming holiday. When you’re in a committed relationship, I think the holiday is all about expectations.

My husband and I are making an effort to spend less on stuff and to spend more on experiences. That doesn’t mean that a girl like me doesn’t appreciate the loving trinket here and there. One of my favorite presents my husband gave me was something that cost less than $10, but it was extremely thoughtful and completely unnecessary. It was a little trinket that he found with my nickname on it.

This year to manage expectations, C and I made a deal. We will be getting each other gifts, but the max price on them is $25. This way no feelings are hurt if one person spends a lot more or if one person decides to forgo the commercialism and get the other nothing.

Of course when you’re in a new relationship, it might not be so easy to be forthcoming and manage expectations. My friend and her boyfriend agreed not to buy presents for each other this past Christmas. However his friends were convinced that when they said no presents, she would still expect something (to a certain degree, I would agree that I would expect something small). He ended up getting her theater tickets, which she loved, but then she had to scramble to get him something. I think it’s much easier when you can honestly communicate with your significant other to ensure that expectations are met.

Becoming the Bread Winner

Madame X and Meg posted great commentary about the affect of disparate salaries in dating relationships article in the NY Times here and here. This caused me to think about the earning history of my husband and me.

In my relationship with my husband, we have flip flopped several times in who was the bread winner. When we first began dating, we were both students. I was impressed by his economic resources with his part-time research job and his upcoming (& lucrative) summer internship. Soon thereafter I graduated and began working in my first "real" job. That allowed me to be the breadwinner for about 3 years. In that time we got married. My husband then became the breadwinner again once he began working full-time.

Due to our career paths, we had a feeling that I would surpass my husband's income. He works for a non-profit. I work in a fairly lucrative industry. He gets really good benefits. I get sub-par benefits. Recently with my raise, I surpassed my husband's income.

Before this happened, I thought about how it would change the dynamics of our relationship. My husband is similar to the author of this post. He would rather spend the extra money to get more of his time while I am always looking for ways to save money. I wondered if my husband would be more willing to listen to my money saving schemes. I wondered if he would feel uncomfortable or threatened. Money is a form of power and I wondered if it would have an effect on how we relate to each other.

Well, aside from some light hearted teasing, the income change has not affected our relationship. My husband is not likely to spend of any more of his time machinating with me on how to increase our net worth through savings. Nor does he seem to feel insecure about my earnings. However, now when he tells me not to waste money on things like doing surveys or cutting coupons, I can tell him that I am focusing on both the offense and defense part of our net worth strategy

Getting Married = New Budget

I've been thinking a lot about how my future husband and I are going to spend our money after we get married. He recently finished school and is still looking for a job. He's in a pretty specialized profession and we want to live in a specific area, so there are only a couple of places where he can work.

I anticipate our combined income to be somewhere between $110K and $150K. I know that's a pretty big range. I know I will be getting a raise and promotion in the first week of September, but I've been told that I won't find out the dollar amount until September, so I am adding my raise into the range.

I'll take the average and assume we will be making $130K. If that is the case, this is how I see our annual budget breakdown:

$30K 401Ks
$13K tithe
$22K taxes (25% on $87K)
$8K Roth IRA
$24K rent (rent should actually be a little bit less, but not much)
$18K misc monthly expenses (inc. utilities, food, gas, student loans etc)
$15K down payment

This brings me to the question - is it more important to max out our retirement savings or save for a downpayment? We already have about $75K saved for a downpayment (remember we live in the Bay Area, so we need quite a bit of $ - we only plan on renting for 1 year since we want to live in SF). I anticipate exiting the workforce, or at least working part-time while raising our kids, so I want to max out my retirement savings while I can. I also plan on living well into my 90's since I had 3 grandparents do that - my grandfather is almost 100!

We will have to figure this out once my fiance actually gets a job and we move into our new place and see what our actual monthly expenses are.

Follow up to Pre-Marital Financial Information

Back in April, I posted about the financial information I knew about my future husband. I am happy to say that he is more of the clueless type, rather than the evasive type. He wasn't withholding information about his finances from me, rather he just didn't really know the information.

After some continued discussion, we decided that he should provide me with his past tax returns. While this is not a complete financial picture, it was something he could easily provide. He provided the information to me, allowing me to get a better sense of his financial picture. We joked that I was "auditing" him. One of the main things was I wanted to find out where all of his different accounts were. Unfortunately we do not have any accounts at the same institutions, which means someone will have to get used to a new company.

For me, it wasn't so much that I wanted to know everything about my fiance's finances. Rather I wanted him to be willing to share the information with me, even if it took some researching on his part.