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SAHM'ing and being $ dependent
And, now for something completely different.
THis is something I can totally identify with... from feeling like my work is meaningless because I don't get paid for it, to feeling like I "shouldn't" buy that Old Navy shirt. Weird after 20 years of being independent.
(Hopefully not entering mommy war territory late Friday afternoon...)
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Cash Poor
How did my husband become my bank?
By Gillian Telling | March 30, 2012
I?ve always been a financially independent person. That?s not to say I?ve been loaded (I haven?t) or that I haven?t borrowed money in times of need (I have), but I?ve always known what it was like to work hard and get paid cold cash money in return. I just never realized how much I valued the exchange of hard work and hard cash until I was no longer in charge of my own finances.
I?d been working in New York City for a decade, mostly in publishing, before I had my first baby. Like women everywhere, I struggled with the dilemma of going back to work or not after my (unpaid!) maternity leave was up. On one hand, I loved my job as an editor of a small luxury magazine, but on the other, the nanny fees were going to eat up most of my paycheck. (Daycare options were either creepy or non-existent.) And so, after a lot of back and forth with my husband, we decided we could, at least for a year, afford to have me stay at home.
Once it was decided, I was actually really looking forward to the change. Besides not really wanting to leave the baby yet, I?d also been schlepping to offices for years and the idea of not having to get on the crowded subway in the morning filled me with glee. And so began my new career of feeding, diapering, entertaining, taking care of household crap, and coming up with lots of activities for my son and I to do so we (I) wouldn?t die of boredom. Though some working women may read this and think it sounds God-awful, I actually enjoyed my new job of mom. I was both good at it and loved it.
But there were unexpected downsides as well. For starters, unlike at a day job, I didn?t have a boss or co-workers to remind me I was good at what I did, or anyone to complain to when days got rough. Some of my friends were envious of what they perceived as my new life of leisure, and others wrote me off as a boring mom who wouldn?t be fun anymore. But the biggest adjustment was not getting a paycheck. After years of seeing a regular deposit, adjusting to that awesome SAHP salary, zilch, made me feel, well valueless. (Maybe that?s why the acronym sounds like ?sap??)
These days I have a shared checking account that gets financed by the bank of dad ? my husband. Prior to having kids, we kept our finances completely separate. We didn?t need to combine them ? he paid some bills, I paid others. He paid for some dinners, I paid for others. It was never a problem. But now I continually find myself struggling over how to tell him that we need more money in this shared account so I can buy ? things. You need things when you?re raising a kid ? diapers, clothes, food, shampoo, new socks. And I need things too ? clothes, food, shampoo ? shoes. He?s not a cheap man ? far from it ? but as someone who always took pride in working and being independent, I can?t help but feel both embarrassed and ashamed that I am not making my own money to pay for said things. I?m doing exactly what generations of feminists warn against ? being financially dependent on a man.
I know I?m not the only mother to feel this way. In fact, most of my conversations with fellow mom friends at the playground run along the lines of this: ?I think I need a job. How do I get a part-time job? Do they even exist?? ?I?m embarrassed to tell my husband I?ve run out of money again.? ?I?m so broke right now I don?t have the money for playgroup.? ?I haven?t bought a new winter coat because I just don?t feel like I can use the money on myself.? ?What can I possibly do from home to raise some money while I?m taking care of the kids?? These comments all come from formerly independent, hard-working, and fiercely proud ladies. (Among them are a food stylist, a former documentary producer for the BBC, and an actress.) We?re not broke as couples, but as individuals, we?ve got nothing. And it really freaks us out.
I think that one of the worst parts about being financially dependent on my husband is that I can no longer be privately frivolous with the way I spend. When I worked and earned a decent keep, if I saw a pair of jeans I loved, I would simply buy them. If I needed highlights, I got them. If a friend wanted pricey Mexican for dinner, I was there, throwing down my card for an $85 dinner on a Tuesday night. Now I feel like I don?t even deserve a simple Old Navy shirt that?s on sale for $15, because it?s not ?my money.? Also, when you buy everything from a shared account, it gives someone else insight into how you spend. You lose your self-respect and your privacy in one fell swoop. (No one but myself really needs to know how often I visit a certain cheese shop in the neighborhood.)
My husband and I have talked about my issue with this many times, too often for his liking. It always ends with the same conclusion on my part. ?I?m going to have to go back to work.? It also always ends with his same answer: ?I can support this family for a little while longer, we agreed you?d raise our son, which you?re great at.? Wonderful, right? Other women should be so lucky! But for whatever reason, like all the moms I know, I still feel guilty about the arrangement. ?I know I should feel like what I do is enough, but I just don?t,? a fellow mom told me just yesterday. ?Something about not getting a check makes me feel worthless.?
I?m not sure there?s a solution to these feelings of insecurity, so I try to remind myself that we can?t have it all. I know very few women can have enough quality time with their kids and enough money to feel comfortable buying what they want when they want it. At the end of the day, it was my choice to make the tradeoff to spend these early years with my son and it?s been worth it. Still, I would kill for a morning where I didn?t wake up and think, ?I?m broke.?
I am the 99%.
Re: SAHM'ing and being $ dependent
I feel this way because I don't have a job since I moved for MH's job. Now I'm considering a career change, but the idea of not making my own money makes me feel horribly insecure and like I wasted all that education, am a horrible feminist, etc.
Part of me feels pressured to have kids just to have an excuse to not be doing anything.
Even without kids, I can totally relate to that. It was a huge shock to move to Japan where I couldn't have a job. I had to be so completely dependent in a way I never anticipated. I mostly got over it, but I still had a very different view toward money than if I was also earning it.
Salt in the wound was that I needed him to do things like purchase and register the car, even when he was out of the country for a few months. I had my own money, for my own car, and I wasn't able to buy it without his signature. Ouch.
I agree with the feelings she writes about and it's one of the primary reasons why I keep working. It's funny, since DH was a student for so long and *I* was the bank of the family, and now that he has a job I could stay at home (although we'd struggle), but I don't want to. I just don't feel comfortable with it right now at this stage in my life....i do wish I could have more time and find the mythical perfect part time job, but I like working too much to ever really consider stopping.
meh, we both work and I can still relate since we have very little at the end of the month. Even when DH had his old job I felt guilty having as much "fun money" as he since he made more. Now we just create more line items in the budget. So instead of including diapers in the grocery fund - it's its own line item and gets a specific amount each paycheck. So we do that for each of our personal $$ too. We transfer them to our personal accounts and use it or let it build up to buy what we want. If one of us SAH and the other made the same as the both of us combined do now, we'd keep the same approach (no way could one of us SAH otherwise).
It's the same with retirement and life ins. and all those other things you have to give to the SAHP when they aren't working. Yeah, I get the initial guilt, but once you've both agreed that that person gets/deserves that amount and it becomes routine, it's not the same issue.
Reading stuff like this makes me feel better about going back to work.
Reading stuff like this makes me think I will go back to work earlier than I planned.
Staying home did not change our finances. We always had a joint budget and accounts. It didn't matter if the income was coming from one check or two. We had to pay attention to spending, but we both had to do that, not just the "dependent" one.
My Chart My Nest Bio
That wasn't really the point of the article.
I've never really felt this way, maybe because my husband and I have always shared our money and have never had separate accounts.
If it really is about the money, you could solve this problem relatively easily by adding more line items to your budget: one for a monthly salon visit for the highlights, another for clothing purchases, maybe another for "fun money" (so she can feel free to buy the cheese and whatever other little treats she wants). I see a lot of couples doing this on MM, including both dual income and single income households. Of course you have to tailor it to your particular budget to make sure you can afford it but I think a lot of people find it useful in that it takes the guilt out of more frivolous purchases, like expensive cheese.
I call BS on the moms at the playground talking about money. I've never experienced this. I really can't picture anyone talking like that. Before I stopped working I managed all the financial accounts. I still do - the only difference is that there's only one incoming paycheck. If a SAHM feels she can't buy groceries because she doesn't have a paycheck then she has a communication or a marriage problem.
The only time I felt $$ dependent was when I applied for a new CC for the rewards program and it asked for *my* income and not HHI. I applied as DH instead (with his consent of course). I thought that was kind of crappy, to me we're the same financial entity so what does it matter who the card holder is?
Anything you can achieve through hard work, you could also just buy.
My Chart My Nest Bio
I can see the difficulty on an emotional, self-worth level, and I should disclose that I'm speaking from the extremely equitable position of making the same as my husband, but a lot of these issues sound like marriage & financial planning problems.
I won't pretend that joint accounts are the only answer for every marriage, but I don't know how seperate accounts work for couples with only one income. It sounds like the husband is giving the wife an allowance to support the household while he spends the rest of "his" money at will. Of course that's not equitable.
I haven't had my own account no one else has access to for six years, and I don't have any guilt about my spending habits as long as they're within our mutually agreed upon budget.
I am feeling this like whoa lately because of the extended period of time I have not been gainfully employed. Granted, my H signed on for some of it, but it still feels horrible feeling that I'm not contributing to the household income.
H and I were in our 30s when we got married. I had been completely independent before that, and the feeling of being dependent on him for everything is scary and gives my self worth a solid kick in the gut, even if I am in school FT.
You know how we do
I was in college with a typical college student job when I met DH. I wanted to SAH but as a single mom I had to have a job. When DH and I got married it made a lot more financial and practical sense for me to SAH. His plus mine meant we had 3 kids and with the kids starting school, his custody order, and his work hours, he wouldn't have been able to have the kids for visits if it weren't for me.
Everyone once in a great while I feel like this but DH reminds me of how much I contribute. Before me he had priced how much it would cost to hire out many of the things I do so even though I bring in very little money ( I do at home daycare) I save DH a lot. DH and I have a joint account that his paycheck goes into and I also have my own checking and savings. On payday he gives me my portion of money for household things and it goes into my account with what I make. DH doesn't know what I spend unless I tell him so I think that helps a lot too.
I think I'm missing some sort of money guilt chip.
I don't even see MH's salary as his money. It's just ours. Always has been. If I was working, and when I did, in the past, it was ours.
If our household can afford it, I can afford it. Where the money comes from doesn't change our budget.
You and me both. I also don't feel like I'm relying on him, because he relies on me for things, too. If I dropped dead tomorrow and he had to do all the errands that make the house run, like buying everyone's food and clothes and drugs and cooking and cleaning it all, he'd be up shitcreek. It's not that he couldn't do it, it's just the time it would take out of his work time and free time.
But then, the trailing wife experience of not being able to discuss your own utility bills with the utility company or open a bank account kind of makes mere economic dependency seem trifling.
Same here. My DH makes the money, but I dole it out and control it. He has no idea how much money we have or don't have at any given point. I have the freedom to do whatever I want/buy whatever I want if we have the money. He has to come to me to ask before he can buy a new suit for work or something else more than around $100 (not ask like needs my permission but needs to know when it's going to work for our budget- so yeah, maybe kind of like permission). Sometimes I feel bad for *him.* He's like some kind of modern day man servant, working all day to make the money and then having no control over it. Poor guy.
LOL! MH never spends money and I feel bad for him. He does most of our financial stuff, but rarely buys something for himself. I spend it on him, though.
I also agree that I've always felt confident in my contributions to our household. MH is able to work the hours he works, never have to call in b/c of the kids or take off for doctors appointments because I take care of these things. He doesn't know much about Jackson's school schedule, nor does he go to the grocery store. I do these things (and many others) and I know that without me, he'd be struggling to do it all.
I don't think I will really feel financially independent until we retire. I kind of get people not liking to be dependent on another person--that's why I want to retire early--but so long as I am relying on another person financially, I can't think of anyone better than DH. Being dependent on him is so much better than being dependent on an employer. I work now, and I like that it means we have more than twice as much money (don't have kids yet to reduce the two income effect), but it is so much better for my sanity to be dependent on DH for our needs, and have my paycheck just be gravy, than to think of my paycheck as something I need (and therefore am dependent on my employer for).
Also, in the above case, both spouses are dependent on each other after they added a child to their lives. Obviously *neither* could afford to pay for childcare on top of the household expenses, or money wouldn't have gotten so tight. They need both parents working (either outside the home or in it) to make ends meet. That's interdependence. And with something as expensive as raising a helpless new person to adulthood, it makes a lot of sense. The only way that you can calculate this as just her being dependent on him is if you don't value having the child cared for, which is ridiculous because it costs quite a lot of money to have someone else watch the child, and it is illegal for the child not to be watched by somebody.
For me, that's definitely part of it.
But, it was a conscious decision to have H be the "spreadsheet manager". He brought a bunch of debt to the marriage (about 10x what I had), so our agreement was that he had to manage our way out of it. I figured he'd never really learn how to budget if I took over the finances for him.
Now, we'll be completely debt free at the end of the year (
), so maybe after that I'll take over.
The way we work things, technically all our accounts are joint (inasmuch as I have access to them through our CU's website). There's one account I use the most. In that account, a sum per paycheck is autodeposited. That's "my" account. From that money, I pay for our groceries, after that, whatever I have left (usually about $30/ week) is for random expenses... hitting the kids' consignment store, picking up the random thing we need from Target, or a latte with friends, or whatever.
There's more money available, but if I need an infusion, I generally ask for it. I suppose I could just say, "gimme $100!", but it's more in my nature to explain. And, more in my nature to have a hard time asking for stuff for myself.
All of this is on my mind, because of something that I posted about the other day. A bargaining website had a pair of boots I desperately wanted, for about $150 instead of their $350 retail (and price at every other website). It was payday, so I had the $150 in my account (but, it was earmarked for groceries).
Honestly, I don't feel comfortable buying $150 of anything without running it by my H. Anything over about $50 (except groceries) I usually run by him, mostly because we DO have shared accounts, and he is the spreadsheet manager, so he can tell me if it makes sense at this moment (we're in debt paydown mode, so we're trying to be really good).
So, I put in a call to him at work. And by the time he called me back (to say yes), the boots were gone.
Does this mean that I'm some kind of doormat? I honestly don't think so. We genuinely try to run "big" purchases by each other - he does the same with me.
I am the 99%.
See, I wish i could feel this way, I just can't for some reason. Not sure why....certainly not because of DH. He sort of views everything as the 'household' money.
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