Chores question- breadwinner works from home.

Years ago, I made all the money for the household and my wife did all the chores. She contributed in the form of time and labor, and I essentially did so as well, just with an employer as an intermediary. This was fair and everyone was happy.

Then my wife got bored being at home all day and decided to do some temp work on occasion to get a little cash for herself. She’d work maybe two days a week for maybe three weeks at a stretch. But then two became four and the assignments got longer. Fast-forward to today where she’s been working at the same place almost full-time for over a year. The house is a little dirtier and the dinner is a little more “instant,” but there’s still that extra weekday to catch up, and still everyone is happy. She’s got her pocket money and I’ve got a nice house to come home to.

But now there’s a possible job offer where I could work from home. This raises a predicament for me, at least, because I can’t decide what the fair way to divide up the chores is. On the one hand, she’s out of the house 30+ hours a week and I’m home with presumably free time, but on the other hand, I’m working from home at a mandatory, can’t-quit job where the fruits of my labor keep the lights on while she’s voluntarily spending time at something presumably more rewarding that scrubbing the shower. I keep going back and forth on who should do what and why.
So pretend you’re a judge of a Household Chore court and tell me what’s fair. Also keep in mind that I’m not actually working from home, so the situation is merely hypothetical, and that we’re more or less happy with the current arrangement.

Oh, and chore judges are Constitutionally barred from making judgments based on gender. Cuz that don’t fly in this house.

Your work time is your work time, presumably. Whether you work at home or not is irrelevant: I don’t see why it should change how much you are responsible for. Your commute will be shorter, so it might make sense for you to take over some more of the dinner prep: after work you are suddenly home, and so in a position to get things started. That said, if neither of you find anything fulfilling in scrubbing a floor and the funds are available, I’d pay someone to do it for you.

First quick answer: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Second quick answer: It would not be unreasonable for you to take on a few chores to balance out the time you are no longer spending commuting (and that is the only “free time” you’re generating here by working from home). Unfortunately, to be fair, you should have started doing more chores as your wife started working more hours.

We usually divy up chores based on available free time. Doing it based on percentage of household earnings seems rather mercenary, IMHO.

So to the extent that working from home frees up some of your time, you should put some fraction of that into extra house chores. And to the extent that your wife has less free time due to working, you should pick up some of the chores.

(or alternatively, just pay someone. Since you have an entire extra fulltime paycheck coming in, you should still come out ahead even if your wife doesn’t make much).

With her basically working full-time now, how did she end up with almost all the household chore duty? Was that something that was negotiated? Or is it assumed that her real job is to keep the house tidy and food on the table, regardless of how many hours she works or how much money she makes?

Not sure what predicament you working from home truly presents. If you have more time and think the house could stand to be cleaner, there is no law that says you can’t pick up a sponge and clean. If you have more time and think the house could stand to be cleaner, but you don’t want to be the one to clean, well, that’s just being lazy. Do you think your wife will start demanding that you pick up more the chores if you started working from home?

Pretty much this.

However…keep in mind that it’s your house. It’s also her house. If either of you <if? WHEN> start feeling grumpy about doing ‘more’ chores than the other, remember that it’s YOUR HOUSE. YOU live there. You’d be doing the chores all by your lonesome if you weren’t married, so take the same time you would as if you were there alone.

This is what I tell myself, anyway. It often works…but not always. :stuck_out_tongue: But it helps to remember that. :wink:

I’ve always wondered whether a ‘one week on, one week off’ thing would work. Each week, the partners switch off being the main housekeeper, with the other picking up slack if they want to/can, whatever.

I’m just grateful that when I was working part time, the money I earned was never referred to as my ‘pocket change’. Ugh. It was our money and we didn’t note who provided what.

Whomever has time cleans and it varied from week to week. He went out of town? I picked up the slack. I had a busy week (work, volunteer activities etc), he picked up the slack. When I worked part time I had more daytime free so I took care of appointments, like repair guys coming over, or car repairs.

Once we were both back full time we both just did what we could without tracking who made what. But household stuff wasn’t allowed to get in either of our way to get work done. So if you’re working from home, it’s work time unless you decide you have a minute to throw laundry in. If she’s working out, but making less, her work still counts as a family priority.

Working from home vs. working a job elsewhere doesn’t mean you need to change the distribution of which chores belong to which person.

On the other hand, especially if you are significantly reducing your commute time, it would make sense to contribute some of that newly free time to household chores.

Especially if you’ve been noticing that the house is getting dirtier as your wife gets more involved with things outside the house.

Alternately, see if collectively you’d rather pay for a cleaner–it wouldn’t be my choice, but there’s a lot of people it works for.

I’m self-employed, working at home, and I have been the primary breadwinner for about 10 years. Mr. S has pretty much always had a full-time job outside the house. Before 2001 he was the breadwinner, but then fortunes changed and he’s been job-hopping ever since.

So I feel that I’m qualified to speak on this topic. :slight_smile:

When he first lost his (good) job, he was home for about four months, living on his severance package and regrouping for the job search. This was an adjustment period for me too, as I ramped up my workload and started shaking the bushes for better-paying clients. During this time we joked that he was “Master of the House,” essentially playing Mr. Mom (though we have no kids) and taking care of housework so I could maximize my work time.

We’ve continued more or less in that vein. My schedule is flexible, so I pitch in as time permits. It’s good for me to get up from the computer now and then, so I might wash a sink of dishes or pick up the living room. We each do our own laundry and do towels, etc. as needed. But he usually does dishes every morning. We cook and grocery shop based on who has the ambition. But we also do a lot of simple things like sandwiches, pasta, steamed veggies, frozen dinners, etc. He usually works the evening shift, so we don’t often “cook dinner.” He’s also the dog wrangler and usually feeds them, walks them (when he’s home), etc. But his job (nursing assistant) can be physically and mentally stressful, so sometimes I step up more when he’s exhausted.

He handles most of the yard work, repairs, car maintenance, etc. But again, if I’ve got an afternoon off I might spend it mowing the lawn. I take care of bill paying, record keeping, tech maintenance (computers, phones, etc.), and the social calendar pretty much exclusively.

We’re both pretty flexible on how perfectly the cleaning/cooking needs to be dealt with (not very), and when stuff needs doing it gets done when someone gets a round tuit. We don’t really stress about it.

We do need both incomes. For a while we lived pretty much on my income alone, but because of various changes in situation, that would be tough these days.

Does that help?

That’s part of the issue, here. She works strictly for her own entertainment. Is that “free time”? Is it any different than if she went to the movies all day or even, I dunno, volunteered at the old folks’ home? Or is it actually work that should be respected as such?

I’ve thought of that, but the thing is, the best person to hire to clean it is…my wife. I’ve said many, many times that I’d “pay her” to quit her job, but she doesn’t want my money.

To me, it’s not who’s working the longest, but who’s paying what. I pay 100% of all mandatory spending, and then some, while she keeps 100% of her money for whatever she wants it for. So thus far, it’s been an “I work for food, you work for fun” sort of deal. If I could quit, I would, but she can quit and doesn’t. So I guess you could say that, yes, her “real job” is to cook and clean until the day comes where she decides to contribute money (i.e. indirect labor) to keeping the lights on.

Lastly, I can stand for the house to be a lot dirtier and the dinner to be worse than she can. That’s why I don’t care if she works or not. She’ll hit her limit long before I will. That’s sort of what worries me. Say I work from home, and she hits her dirtiness limit and says to me “You’re home all day. Can’t you vaccuum?” Then I’m doing it not because I want it done, but because she wants it done.

Respect her work because she values it and, presumably, you value her.
Pool your incomes. One pot that pays bills, gets saved and gets used for fun. Don’t think of you as the serious earner and her as the fun earner. You both contribute to funding and running your life together. That’d be my advice, fwiw.

I should add that a benefit of working from home – presuming you don’t have a draconian employer who insist that your butt must be in your chair for 8 hours straight – is that you can fit chores around work. I alluded to this above. I can spend 2 minutes throwing in a load of laundry, then come back 20 minutes later and spend a minute throwing it in the dryer, etc. I can take a stretch break and pick up the house or make the bed. And so on.

Can’t do that when you’re at work elsewhere.

I don’t understand. Is she earning income or not?

If she doesn’t want to clean the house, she’s pretty clearly not the best person to do it. There are people who want to clean your house in return for money. Give them money and they’ll clean it. Your wife gets to do what she wants, you don’t have to do the chores you don’t want to do it and some house cleaner that wants to clean your house gets work. Win, win win.

Money is fungible.

Then she needs a re-education about what working at home entails. I haven’t run up against this much (lucky!) because many of my friends/family are self-employed, or at least can grok that I WORK A LOT, even though I do it at home. I’m “at the office” same as you when it comes to getting work done. Probably more, because (in my case, being self-employed) I have to work both billable and non-billable hours and cover my own overhead, bennies, insurance, etc.

There’s also a lot of sense in the idea that if if bugs you, YOU take care of it. Case in point: Mr. S rarely does ALL of the dishes. He does a sinkful, or two, or until he gets bored or the water gets cold. He likes to leave the big stuff (pots), the difficult stuff (things with a lot of pieces), the stuff we rarely use anyway so don’t need it right away.

This bugs me some, but I recognize that there’s value in the fact that he keeps up in plates, glasses, and silverware – the basics. If I want to see a bare counter, guess what? I roll up my sleeves and get crackin’.

She wants the vacuuming done once a week? Have her let you know in advance so you can close your office door so the noise won’t disturb you.

You add one half your total commute time (i.e. one way commute) to your current house cleaning time, and your wife takes the same amount OFF her house cleaning time. So, you spend - what, ten hours a week on house work now? Assuming a one hour one-way commute, add five hours for you, take five off for her.

That offer’s been on the table for years. She’s never taken it and never will. She says it’s important to her to make and have her own money, so I just shrug and let it be. If we were to do that, then we’d have to split the chores evenly, even if it was only a, say 5-to-1 dollar match.

Yes. Hers. She keeps all of it. I’m fine with that.

But then the household as a whole has no more money that if my wife never worked. So I’d essentially be paying her to not be at home. That makes no sense to me.

And that’s really the crux of the issue, and why it’s so confusing to me to tell what’s fair. Her money displaces my money, even if it’s for frivolous things like yet another pair of shoes. But at the same time, money is just a representation of labor, and the only reason I labor for 40 hours a week is to keep a roof over our heads. So in that sense, my labor is quite literally equal to the labor of cleaning the house, right? And if she keeps all her money, then she keeps all of her labor, so we’re back to square one.

Well, to be fair, perhaps my job would consist of mainly slacking off and phoning it in for 6 out of my 8 hours. And perhaps she wouldn’t actually say such things. It all being hypothetical, I don’t know if we can really say what “working from home” entails.

Suppose my home gig were really, really easy but ALSO solely responsible for feeding and clothing us. What’s fair then?

My advice: drop the idea that your money is real money and her money is somehow “hobby” money.

You both work. You both live in the house. You both should keep it clean.

Personally, I would pay someone to do it, too bad your wife isn’t interested in quitting her job to clean the house, find somone who will take your money to clean it.

I strongly believe that basic household tasks (cooking dinner, grocery shopping, dishes, garbage, weekly scrub down, laundry) should be approximately 50-50 whenever possible. It builds character to wash your own undies and boil up a pot of pasta now and then. A household needs everyone to contribute, and that means everyone pitches in around the house.

I also think the minimum for “basic household tasks” is pretty low. Everyone needs to contribute at least to a “college dorm chore wheel level” of basic cleaning-up-after-yourself. This may mean on your dinner nights, you get take-out and eat off paper plate. If someone wants to go above and beyond that…awesome. But neither party has any real obligation to. If the place is neat, the garbage doesn’t pile up, you guys eat something every night and have clean undies every day, nobody has any real right to complain. If they want more, they are perfectly capable of doing more, but as long as the bases are covered it’s all good.

I find the idea that the lesser paycheck is a “fun” or “extra” job to be rather toxic. To begin with, even if she is making minimum wage, at a full time job that is a significant chunk of money. Do you realize some people raise entire families on that money? What she brings in does a lot to cover the basic funding of food, shelter and clothing. It’s great that you are able to go above and beyond and bring in more, but that doesn’t mean she’s not doing anything to keep the family afloat. If you look at what you really need to survive, she surely bringing in her share.

She also provides stability and security. You may have heard that the job market can be somewhat unpredictable. Her work, and more importantly her maintaining her job skills, provides a valuable back up. God forbid, if something should happen to you or your job, wouldn’t aren’t you happy knowing your wife has the ability to provide for herself? That has value in itself. And then there is the intrinsic value in doing work that extends outside of your household, you wife’s sense of purpose and well-being, and all of that. That’s not “extra” or “fun”, that’s a part of who the woman you married is as a person.

So there is my stand- aim for an evenish split, with generous exceptions and a general spirit of helpfulness.

Well, even if she’s making minimum wage, I doubt a house cleaner would absorb her entire salary. But even if it did, if she wants to work and doesn’t want to clean the house, then obviously its not “all the same”.

Eh, whether she puts the money in a joint account and then takes it out to buy shoes or puts it in her own account and then uses that to buy shoes its the same difference.

Honestly, your issue seems to be more with your wifes working situation then with division of household chores. But since you just asked for advice about the latter, I’ll just re-iterate what I said in my first post: they should be divided up by available free time. I don’t think anything regarding relative size of incomes or whose income goes into what bank account changes that.