This is going to be a bit of a Pro/Con post, but I'm going to write both the Pro and the Con side! I feel qualified to do so as we've been all of the following:
- Low Income Single-Earner Family
- Low Income Two-Earner Family
- Medium Income Single-Earner Family
- Medium Income Two-Earner Family
- High Income Single-Earner Family
- High Income Two-Earner Family
But I'll let you be the judge of whether I give either side of this argument short shrift. This topic is surprisingly controversial across the internet, so it should be a lot of fun to discuss. We'll mostly be talking about high-income families since that's what most readers of this blog are.
Pro
One-Earner Families Are Super Efficient
One-earner families are awesome for a lot of different reasons. Let's list them out:
Lower cost of education
While both partners in many families (like mine) have advanced educations, you can save a lot of money on medical, dental, or law school educations in a single-earner family. Most of the time when I meet couples with more than $500K in student loans it is because both of them went to professional school. That much debt is a big deal in any family, but especially if one person later decides they want to work part-time or not at all. In a single-earner family where only one of them went to professional school? Much easier to manage that $200-300K debt.
Lower payroll taxes
One of the most expensive taxes on a two-earner family is paying Social Security tax on both partners. In 2018, the maximum income subject to Social Security tax is $128,700. When you include both the employer (6.2%) and the employee (6.2%) half of that tax, it adds up to $15, 959. In a two-earner household, you can double that- nearly $32K in Social Security tax alone! How many days does that second earner have to work just to pay that Social Security tax? At $1,000 a day, that's nearly a month's worth of work.
Better return on Social Security dollars
As long as we're talking about Social Security, let's talk about the back end- when you start getting the benefits. Even if the non-working spouse never works forty quarters in their entire life, they still get 1/2 of the working spouse's Social Security benefit. And when the working spouse dies? They get the Social Security benefit of the spouse. What does the two-earner family get? Well, they might get a little more if they're both high earners, but at best they pay twice as much in taxes for just 33% more benefit.
Lower income taxes
Lots of people talk about the “marriage tax penalty.” That's not an entirely accurate way to describe how the tax code works. In reality, marriage decreases your tax burden. You get more advantageous tax brackets and lots of your phaseouts are raised. The penalty is on a married couple where both are earning money. In reality, having a stay-at-home parent is a great way to reduce your tax burden. And given that the second spouse's income is essentially all taxed at the first spouse's marginal tax rate (or higher) and our tax code is progressive, it gets even worse. Higher incomes mean more phaseouts too. If you're wondering how other families seem to get by on a gross income of $50-100K, the answer is often a dramatically lower tax burden.
Specialization breeds efficiency
One-earner families have often found that by having one person earning and one person being a homemaker, they are both able to specialize on what they do best. The earner has nothing holding back her career. She can come in early, stay late, work weekends, and take on big projects knowing there is someone else who will keep the home fires burning, pick up the kids from school, get them to piano lessons, and make sure they are becoming good people. Meanwhile, the stay-at-home parent can concentrate on efficient spending of the household's resources and making sure the non-financial tasks of the family are done well.
Fewer work-related expenses and hassles
Spring break in Canyonlands, NP backcountry
Having two high-income jobs brings on a lot of additional expenses. Medical staff dues, malpractice insurance, DEA fees, CME fees, licensing fees, commuting costs, and work clothing all add up quickly. But they're doubled if you're both docs. Even if one or both of you is working part-time, those expenses are all doubled.
Lower child-related costs
Childcare is crazy expensive, especially in big cities. It can be downright depressing for a couple to calculate the hourly rate for the second spouse once you take not only the additional taxes but also the additional costs of childcare into account. It is often significantly less than minimum wage unless that second spouse has very high earning potential. There is a child care tax credit, but most who read this blog are phased out of it.
Easier scheduling
There is no need to plan vacations, trips, and even day to day activities around two work schedules if only one person is working. If the worker has 5 days off, they can go on a 5-day trip. This effect is markedly decreased with school-aged kids unfortunately as they often dictate vacation schedules.
REPAYE subsidies
The federal income-driven repayment programs provide lower payments, and with REPAYE, higher subsidies to one-earner families. If nothing else, this dramatically decreases the complexity of student loan management.
In short, a single-earner family can be a very efficient way to have a great life on a surprisingly low amount of income.
Con
Two-Earner Families Have More Flexibility
My wife has been back in the workforce for the last couple of years after a decade-long break incarceration opportunity. Sure, she works from home as an owner and employee of The White Coat Investor, but don't laugh, she probably makes more than you do and works just as hard. Plus her boss partner is tough to deal with. But this has given us the chance to see some real benefits of being a dual-earner family.
Less need for life and disability insurance
Gold Level Scholarship Sponsor
Two-earner families can often function at least partially as each other's life and disability insurance. If you only have one earner, you'd better insure very well against something happening to that earner. The difference here could be $500 or more a month.
Higher income
This one doesn't get enough press. One of the best parts of being a two-income family is that you get two incomes. That's more money. Sure, you spend more on taxes. Sure, you spend more on child care and work expenses. But in the end, you've got more money. That means more financial security. Better vacations. Better stuff. Earlier retirement. While I think it's not that hard to become a financially independent multi-millionaire as a single-doctor family, there's no doubt that the higher your income the easier it is to become rich. You can spend more, save more, invest more, and give more.
More retirement accounts
Here's another one people don't think about that often. Two earners often mean two sets of retirement accounts. If two couples, one a single-earner and one a dual-earner, need the same amount of money to retire, guess which one is going to have a larger percentage of their nest egg inside tax-protected and asset-protected accounts? Even if you're not maxing out your opportunities, you get to choose the better plan to do your investing in. You may even qualify for two employer matches. Sure, single-earners get to use a spousal Backdoor Roth IRA, but that's only $5,500. With Katie working at The White Coat Investor, we get to put $110K instead of $55K into the WCI Individual 401(k). At our 42.9% marginal tax rate, that's $23,595 off our tax bill. Every year. And that doesn't count the effects of decades of additional tax and asset protection.
More opportunities for part-time work
The flexibility of having either partner be able to support the family is huge. In particular, this often results in the opportunity for part-time work. Working part-time is an incredible burn-out reducer. When you are both capable of breadwinning, you can both go part-time or alternate who is part-time throughout your careers. You're working less for money and more because you want to and that can result in more enjoyable careers.
More opportunity to pursue passions
Lots of two-earner families have two earners simply because both partners wanted to pursue a paid career. If both partner's passions involve paid work, that can become a big issue in a one-earner family. If one partner would rather be earning but feels forced to keep house and change diapers, a lot of resentment can develop. Likewise, the breadwinning partner often forgets that just because work isn't paid doesn't mean it isn't work. All of that is avoided when you both have jobs and are both contributing to the household expenses. Americans, in particular, attribute a lot of status to their professions and careers, and having two earners allows both partners to have that status.
Shared career sacrifices
Sacrifices sometimes have to be made in order to have both partners in the workforce. But when there are two of you, those sacrifices can be shared. This leads to a sense of equality in the relationship. Perhaps one person passes up a promotion for the good of the family, but the next time, the other person can do so. While good relationships should always consider it “our money” no matter who earned it, that is psychologically easier to do when both are earning.
In summary, dual-earner families can build wealth more easily and have more career flexibility while pursuing their passions.
What do you think? What advantages or disadvantages of single or dual-income families did I miss? Comment below!
At least since having kids, we’ve only had a single earner household. It’s been wonderful in terms of time flexibility, since if I have time off, we can pick up and go camping or on a quick road trip without worrying about two vacation schedules. But the single earner model definitely puts more mental and professional pressure on the person working, which can’t be covered by disability insurance.
Happy to hear your family’s transition to a dual earner household has gone smoothly!
Right after college many of my good friends made the calculation of taxes, daycare and other expenses you discussed and concluded dual income was not worth it.
All couples should ask themselves this question. Then when the economics are clear discuss the quality of life issues.
I don’t have a hard number handy but pretty sure dual income couples are a lower percentage now than a while back because of all of this.
Great pros and cons comparison for both sides of the argument.
I think the bigger tax deferred shelter available is huge (although this potentially sets up from large RMDs down the line as well).
At my single income level I would pretty much be phased out of everything whether it was single or dual income so that is a wash.
If both incomes are similar than there are great tax benefits for being married dual income. If one is large and the other is small, it may make more sense to file separately (otherwise lower income would be subject to higher earners marginal rate)
Even with disparate incomes, it usually is better to file MFJ. One possible exception is if the lower earner is going for PSLF.
This one strikes close to home for us. I have a post coming out on this topic, actually.
My wife, after 7 years of part time work (to maintain a footprint in her field of work) following the birth of our first kid, has decided to go back to work full-time. This is going to dramatically increase our day care costs. Given that she works in elementary school education in the south, she won’t be earning a lot.
However, I think this downside is replaced by two massive upsides:
1) my wife is able to have career fulfillment. Truth be told, she is a gifted teacher and needs to be in the workforce shaping other teachers and the future generations that will someday run our country.
2) it gives us access to tax protected retirement space that we haven’t had in years. In fact, because she is a teacher she gets access to two 401Ks (one is called a governmental 457…pretty safe unlike the non-governmental variety) and a state pension. So, outside of SS and CMS taxes, we won’t have to pay tax on anything else as her income gets absorbed into pre-tax retirement space.
Definitely thought provoking.
TPP
I had two residency classmates who ran the numbers after they had kids and realized it made more sense for their spouses not to work. Factoring in the cost childcare, they actually came out ahead!
My wife and I are both physicians, so we come out ahead financially by both working, but the margin is not as much as you might think. Also, with us both being physicians we have to spend much more on childcare than we would if we had more regular jobs. There are nights where we are both on call, and both have to go into the hospital (its rare, but it happens), and we obviously have to have someone available to be at the house with our kids. That kind of availability is not cheap!
-Ray
That was definitely the conclusion we came to when I was in residency and my teacher wife came home.
https://www.whitecoatinvestor.com/the-hidden-costs-of-a-dual-income-household/
Add in the fact that she wanted to be home with Whitney and it was a no-brainer. She did do a little baby-sitting for one of my classmates (very tough to find child care for an EM resident/nurse couple) that helped some.
we manage ok as Anesth and EM, I can’t even imagine trying to pay for child-care if you both get called in relatively unexpectedly.
Another aspect of this to consider is the ugly but likely (1 in 4 if not as high as 1 in 2) risk of divorce or some other disruption of the plan. In addition to a two career family being partial disability cover for each other, they are baseline income maintenance guarantees for the family in the case of a death or divorce. We can usually (at great expense) buy enough life insurance to keep an at home spouse at the same income level if the worker dies, or the worker’s kids and home almost as well cared for if the at home spouse dies, but there’s no insurance cover to keep 2 households at a doctor’s level of spending if only one spouse can earn at that level.
I felt a need to be sure if my husband could no longer (or no longer wished to) work that the family would not demand that of him since we’d come to expect such an income. And that should we ever divorce I do not end up cursing my inability to return to doctoring for a better income than any available if I’ve been out of the field for too long to return. No divorce court will agree that he needs to give me half of his pay for the rest of his life (and that he keep working full time until 65 or 70).
At present our two career plan (though on again off again for me) continues in a new form as he has fully retired but brings in his Army pension, while I cover the risk of losing a good portion of that pension should he die before me by maintaining my ability to return to full time work as a doctor until I’m older. When I work that income further builds our retirement savings so it’ll be less of a financial blow should he die before me later on in life.
I think you’d be surprised what divorce courts mandate. I know several people here in Utah (granted, somewhat anti-hombre here) whose divorce ruling mandated exactly that.
Agree that the possibility of divorce is high, in which case a single-earner plan completely falls apart and the non-career partner is severely disadvantaged by virtue of being out of the workforce for X number of years. Yes, divorce settlements attempt to account for this in the division of assets and in the assignment of alimony/spousal maintenance. Despite this, it is almost always the case that the previously non-working partner will need to get a job after divorce and his or her job opportunities will be compromised by the time outside of the workforce.
Also, divorce is lower in dual income households. A Boston University study looked at divorce rates in across states and found states with higher percentage of dual income households had lower divorce rates. The link below gives pretty good summary.
http://www.bu.edu/bostonia/fall10/couples/
That’s true. Should have included that in the article.
Is that really a factor in anyone’s decision? Oh dear I know we were talking about me quitting to take care of kids through residency+fellowship but if I quit my career we are more likely to divorce? You don’t make decisions based on what % of that population divorces. You pick your partner and build your life together. If you don’t trust them to maintain the marriage then keep your career. If you feel your lives would be benefited by having a parental caregiver then do that. I don’t regret leaving software to raise my sons. My wife gets to have kids and not stress about sick kids or picking them up from daycare. I probably wouldn’t have had kids until after fellowship if I kept my career.
Curt probably the couples more likely to be dual career (and more like you since you COULD be dual career) feel more freedom and that they are in the marriage by choice, not necessity. Please keep in mind divorce is not the only risk (possibly) worse for a one career family, and ensure your partner has good disability and life insurance. And consider if somehow keeping a foothold in your career during your daddy break or soon after would be good for you and/ or the family. And work on the marriage? Even at our grumpiest, with little kids which were probably the main cause of that moment’s grumpiness, I would grumble at my poor husband thus: “your life wouldn’t improve if you left me- I’d make sure YOU got full custody!”
I’m certain one partner taking a sabbatical or going part time often helps a marriage- it has ours. When my job is as heavy or worse than my husband’s it really irks me to feel (correctly or not) I’m also doing the majority of the household duties. When he works a lot more than me I am much happier to do all those things I think need doing which he can ignore for weeks on end and not mind if he does little or nothing during his few times off.
Another one-income househould chiming in. We had a decision to make ten years ago. We had just gotten married. I was freshly out of residency, and my wife was completing her internship to become a registered dietitian. We were eager to start a family and didn’t waste any time.
It was not a difficult decision to have my wife stay home to raise our kids full-time. The marginal tax rate, cost of childcare and effective wage were all considerations, but the biggest lifestyle factor for us was flexibility and ease of scheduling. I worked a lot of weekends but had a lot of time off, too. If I was going to have 8 to 10 weeks off per year, we didn’t want a full-time job for her with 2 to 4 weeks of vacation, which would be pretty typical for a young RD.
Cheers!
-PoF
When we married, my wife (attorney) was working full time for a big company. When the kids came, she quit working full time and took a part time job with a law firm, which she did for about seven years.
Then, before she was really looking, a former colleague offered her a job in another large company and she took it, perhaps a couple years sooner than she wanted, but it was too good to pass up. She has worked there since, 12 years this month.
I wish I could say that we brilliantly planned all of this, but thinking back, we more or less bumbled through these transitions.
Having two professional earners has definitely allowed us to do things and have material possessions that we want while maintaining a high savings rate and achieving financial security…but it does come at a cost. The chaos of nurturing kids and driving them!), maintaining a household, seeing after elderly parents, and finding time for personal activities (let alone relaxation) when two people are working 45-60 hours per week in demanding jobs can be overwhelming at times.
There was a period of time over a couple years when our household “staff” included a morning nanny/housekeeper, an afternoon nanny/driver, a cook (made our meals for the week on Mondays), and a house cleaner. It was not exactly Downton Abbey, but there were a lot of mouths to feed!
Amazing how many people you had to hire to replace one stay at home parent!
I grew up in a single income household but we are a dual income household so I see the pros and cons to both . The big risk of dual income is lifestyle creep so you have to be diligent about keeping a forced budget. We setup our budget for half of one of our salaries. This allows for accelerated savings and the freedom for one or both of us to go part-time.
1/2 of one income- that’s pretty rare financial discipline.
Agree with the comments about childcare costs. At one point we did the math and my husband would have to earn at least $70,000 to cover childcare for the four kids including drop offs, pick ups, etc. That, along with the low number of vacation weeks for most jobs, made it an easy decision for him to stay home. And managing the people needed to juggle a household (a la Downton Abbey) takes up valuable mental energy.
We did end up sending the kids to preschool, but shorter hours and without paying for the pre/post care as we would have if he had been working.
And of course these are always family decisions, and it never makes sense for someone to stay home with kids if they would rather be working, even if it doesn’t make absolute financial sense. I think my husband will want to return to some kind of income-producing activity after our youngest goes to preschool at age 3, but I have no real opinions about it either way.
Decision on what to do depends on so many factors – income potentials (not just current income!), career satisfaction, desire or lack of to stay home. The great new is that most physicians can still make a very nice income working less than full time. This is something I love to emphasize to women docs who want/have a family. Agree with lifestyle creep more of an issue with dual income and it is so important to know that dual income can be cut significantly. Living on one income even if dual is still great advice.
Another issue I just thought of is with unmarried partners. Without the legal protections of marriage (or some sort of similar agreement), it is incredibly risky to stop working in a career in order to come home and raise kids. The earner could walk out at any time and owe nothing but child support.
I think it’s not a purely financial decision (if you have at least one high earner) about whether or not to both work. That said, if both want to work and one is a lower earner, it’s worth considering the financial as well as emotional career impact of leaving the workforce. Kids aren’t in day care forever and if you want to work, you may be better off financially over the life of your career if you continue because as childcare costs decrease income often increases. Just because you’re breaking even working when your kid is a baby doesn’t mean it doesn’t make financial sense to work because kids will eventually go to school (public in our case). My PGY salary has never dramatically exceeded our childcare costs but that doesn’t mean that my family would be better off financially if I did not do paid work. If you want to stay home that’s a different story. I read somewhere that for women, leaving the work force for 3 years decreased lifetime earnings by an average of 30%. Obviously there a lot of confounders and issues with sampling but the effect isn’t small and it’s not always easy to start working once the kids are older.
Depending on your career and skill set, continuing to work and be valuable to your employer can give you the ability to negotiate flexibility in the form of working part time or remotely as my husband did when I was a PGY1-2.
Ultimately, if you as a couple are financially responsible in terms of living within your means and saving, I think it usually makes sense to do what will make everyone happy long term even if you’re taking a financial hit.
One thing I have been noticing lately is that many small business owners and farmers (we live rural) have a spouse (often wife) who works for the hospital or school system and in doing so provides the health insurance for the family. Many times these positions are not high paying but still provide the otherwise very expensive health insurance.
My husband (dentist) and I (physician) calculated what amount of money I would need to make to make working “worth it”. For us the minimum was $200,000. My taxes, marginal on his, would be $60,000 + $40,000 in childcare and household help. So to still come home each year with $100,000 was worth it to us.
While not useful for most WCI readers I was always curious how our medical assistants paid $15/hour were able to afford to work with kids in daycare. Then I learned they receive childcare assistance from the state and do not pay for that.
That’s interesting analysis. I’ve been wondering the same thing with the birth of a second child. Assuming spouse no. 1’s income is already in the highest marginal rate, at what income level does it still make sense for spouse no. 2 to continue working? I am spouse no. 2 and my income is just short of $200,000, but I find the idea of giving up my career quite stressful, as I like having my own 401k and investments that I can direct, but once taxes and child care costs are considered, it is harder to justify 2 busy careers.
wait, you’re the lower earner and you make just short of $200k?! I think the key piece here is that the income of the second earner (non-doctor if we’re talking dual-income households). If the person is a teacher, it’s a lot easier to justify stopping work and making $30-$60k less. But if the person is a lawyer or other high income professional making at least $100k then to me it’s worth it to have that person keep working even if daycare costs are high. We’re about to put 3 kids in daycare for an annual cost of $40k. But it’ll only that bad for one year once the oldest goes to kindergarten (afterschool care is much cheaper than daycare) and it’s worth it to the household to have the second earner continue work if they are making a decent amount in their own right, opening the household up to another 401k, in my case allowing for after-tax contributions to do the mega backdoor roth. To me dual-income is best thought of in terms of giving the household “diversification” whether it’s more money to diversify what you want to spend it on, diversification of retirement accounts, diversification of household working hours, etc
I know this is a first world problem that I wouldn’t mention for general public consumption but, yes, the problem is that 100% of my income is taxed at 39.6% federal plus the state tax on top of that, and so $200k drops down to a little over $100k, then child care is going to be an additional ~$40,000 for daycare plus an after school activities driver for the older child, plus the cost of dry cleaning, gas (fairly significant given +35 minute commute), and the net is probably no more than $50,000, which is a lot of money, but relatively speaking, is it enough? I don’t have a clear answer right now. It’s probably less of a financial decision than one based on just what is going to feel right for everyone.
You’re right-it’s less a financial decision. Not that $50k is nothing to sneeze at…it sucks to have a perceived loss of 75% of your income. BUT, I bet it’s a bit less than you stated if you have access to tax-advantaged retirement savings thanks to your job as well. Further, your household is getting more than $50k b/c you probably get some enjoyment out of your job while providing for others and being productive in the workforce which might be something one values too (especially if they did post-high school education)
Childhood is short. The career you trained for can be very long, but could be disrupted/ terminated by too long a hiatus. As others have said above, even losing money some years with multiple kids in childcare may be repaid in the 10-30 years of professional life after the children and/or the budget no longer stand to benefit from a stay at home spouse. I recommend reading Getting to 50:50 and The Price of Motherhood before opting out of the workforce past maternity leave.
Childhood is short you only get one shot to raise your kids yourself. You can always go back to work you can not go back and raise your kids.
Thanks for a great piece. I’ve enjoyed reading the comments on this one too. Each family has different needs and wants. The decision to stay home or not, has many components with very few of them being financial. I love hearing these stories how others have made it work for them.
Most of my friends and colleagues are two-income professional families, whether medicine, law, academics, etc. I’ll say the one area that got short shift above was scheduling. Depending on the careers, getting enough time off can be difficult if not impossible, or getting time off together becomes too frustrating. Kids and school add a whole entire element to that mix.
One of the reasons I love being in anesthesia is the ability to slowly “wind down” my FTE over many years. Mostly I’ll looking for the mental sanity and more time for biking and skiing, but knowing I can still make a great income, pay less taxes, not have to dip into retirement, makes it all the sweeter.
In the end, it’s going back to what is most important to you and your family and pushing to maximize your ability to make that happen.
Short shrift? Did you skip this paragraph in the article?
How many paragraphs on that topic did I need to write to make the point? 🙂
I recently exchanged some emails with a friend of mine from med school. He and his wife are both medical specialists. Both have worked full time and have stayed married. Result 18 mill net worth and a 5 bedroom house in Park city. Unfortunately most 2 doc or 2 lawyer couples that I know have divorced.
A Con not mentioned in a single-earner household: risk. We sleep a lot better knowing that one of us can still work if something terrible happens at either place of employment. Even though daycare costs ate up earnings, earning pension credit and saving for retirement continued. While every situation is unique, it certainly has helped to reduce our employment risks and have access to retirement plans.
Agreed. My husband is an engineer, and every few years there seems to be a round of layoffs (which he has thankfully avoided thus far). While it wouldn’t be ideal to lose his income, we could still pay the bills, whereas some of his colleagues really freak out about this because they’re the breadwinner for a family of 4. Same with me taking unpaid maternity leave- though it’s temporary and we can save up in advance, his income still being there takes the sting out of it.
The other thing with engineering is that positions which provide the most interesting work might not necessarily be the most stable.
I’ve hopped around a couple of software startups over the past decade. The work environments have been great – no red tape, bureaucracy, and other BS that you get at huge companies.
The downside is the ever-present risk that we lose a big customer, don’t gain another quick enough, and go belly-up due to a lack of cash.
With my wife’s more stable job as a clinical specialist (and our savings rate of >50%), I don’t lose any sleep over that.
My wife’s a doc and I have my own business which has turned out to be the best situation imo 🙂
As the handle suggests we are a double MD household. As others have stated time management is paramount for us. In addition we regularly evaluate the time value of money versus things we can do ourselves.
We used to clean our house ourselves, mow the yard, try to juggle two busy schedules to take kids to school every morning. Now we pay for all of those things to be done by other people and are very glad we did. We have stressful jobs, being stressed at home wasn’t worth it to us.
We still make sure one of us picks up our kids from school every day and we still do work around the house, but not because we HAVE to. At some point my wife would like to go part time so maybe we reevaluate things then but right now it’s worth it for us.
There is another factor that I have not seen in the discussion, though I may have missed it. Namely, in the single income household the stay at home spouse should be insured enough to cover all the expenses nominally avoided by one spouse being available to raise the kids. Vagabond MD’s situation was illustrative. It is not enough to say the household income would remain the same if the stay at home spouse were to die. That’s true, but the expenses would go up tremendously. The insurance is necessary to protect the family standard of living. Fortunately, with kids it is a finite window and term insurance is cheap.
Agreed that the SAH partner should be insured as term life insurance is cheap. However, to the best of my knowledge, it’s not possible to get disability insurance for someone who does not do paid work though household expenses would increase if this partner became disabled. It’s an additional risk in a one income partnership if the non-earning partner became disabled
Good point.
We’ve agreed that my spouse will stay at home. She’s not a high earner, financially it makes sense, but also she’s never had a strong career drive. My career has always taken priority, moving around for my career’s sake while my spouse jumped between jobs and never really got anything going. Moreover my spouse is good at and enjoys domestic duties, being our household manager and my life manager. All I worry about is my work and she happily takes care of everything else. It works out for both of us.
Dual-income household where spouse (MD) earns about 3-4x what I earn. We just had a second kid and cost of childcare will be approaching 30k per year when he enrolls. Despite the income/tax/childcare equation not working in our favor exactly, we will stay dual-income. Primary reason is the benefits I get through my employer. I work for a big multi-national company, and she works for a tiny private practice. Better medical and dental plans, cheaper monthly payments, free disability for me, access to 401k and HSA (employer matching on both), and even a DCFSA. The child she delivered last month would have cost us another couple grand at least, in addition to the thousands extra in premium it would cost us to be on that bare bones health plan offered by her employer.
Isn’t it fascinating that physicians often have the worst healthcare plans? I know a lot of dual-income couples who have the non-physician half working for the benefits. It sounds as if your job is worth keeping, despite the child care costs.
Agreed. I’m at a small private practice and my non-physician husband gets much better benefits than I do. Our practice basically just offers catastrophic medical coverage.
I’m not sure I agree that “lower cost of education” belongs under Single Earner Family, or any family, at all. It seems in this post you’re assuming that single earner families are ones in which one spouse is the earner and the other spouse, who is not, specifically chose early on to not pursue a professional degree because their intent was to stay home with the kids ultimately. Nothing wrong with that, but what if both pursued pricey professional degrees but one decided to stay home, as you state:
“That much debt is a big deal in any family, but especially if one person later decides they want to work part-time or not at all.”
Now I’m sure anyone would agree that circumstance is a “Con” from a strictly financial perspective, so why is “lower cost of education” even a Pro category under Single Earner Family at all?
Right, if the assumption of only one expensive education was paid for isn’t true, that isn’t a pro. If both bought pricey educations before facing this decision, then it’s already water under the bridge.
Sure this doesn’t apply to many couples but it definitely applied to my wife and I who were together in undergrad. When one spouse is going to get a professional degree the other can enter the workforce making roughly what a resident could possibly more. Start paying down that medical tuition/share cost of living/max out roths (wife and I both got full rides in undergrad). By the time the physician is in residency you could have the working spouse stay home and raise kids or you could have them both work till post residency and then have the non MD raise kids. Sure you arn’t swimming in the dough after two professional degrees are paid for but this life with no debt isn’t bad.
Veterinarian here, pricey degree for sure. Decided to stay home full time after having children with my MD husband. For a short period of time, I was out-earning my husband while he was in training. This allowed for a very carefree, dual income no kids lifestyle, and we made some great memories from those years. However, once we had children, it was clear that we were entering a new phase in life, and the decision for me to stay home gave us a better quality of life compared to the alternative of me working. I still think my degree was absolutely worth it, and worth doesn’t have to come down to dollar signs.
Thanks for sharing your personal experience. I’m a mother and part-time engineer. As much as I like working, I often wonder if even this supposedly ideal arrangement is worth the stress and pressure. There is way too much juggling, but the guilt of having gone through all the training, sacrifices, and hard-earned respect after all those years and $ for education makes it hard for me to quit. I guess from my perspective, I’m not sure I would’ve chose the same “pricey” path if I knew for sure I’d stay home.
First world problems, I suppose.
Everyone’s situation is so unique, and obviously what’s right for my family isn’t right for everyone. I never imagined growing up that I was going to be a full time SAHM for an extended period of time, but in the end, I’m glad it worked out this way. My professional life is not over- I still plan to get back into it when the time is right!
First world problems for sure- I am so thankful that we are comfortable on one salary.