She may feel that the change she’s proposing will also help the entire family. Does she think the at-home portions of the work of caring for a family have been getting short shrift? They often do, when all adults are working full-time outside the home.
In other words, you consult with her, she wants you not to do it, but you do it anyway?
Seems to me that in this instance you’re taking all the control and not giving her any.
Also: Is her problem with it that she doesn’t think it makes enough money, or that she thinks it takes too much of your time?
I suspect one of the things you two may need to talk about is how to balance decisions based on what makes the most money versus decisions based on having time available for the family, and for that matter for each of you as individuals.
ETA: As a farmer myself, I understand loving farming, and I understand needing to farm. I don’t know whether that’s why you’re farming, but most people farming in the USA today are doing so at least in part because they love the work. Maybe your wife sees you choosing to take time to do work that you love, and wants to do the same thing herself, thinking that she’d love working with and marketing the oils.
Won’t it benefit the family if she makes more money selling oils and also has more time for the kids?
I mean, i think the oil thing will be a money-sink, but i assume she’s expecting it to be profitable. You have to look at decisions from her perspective.
When I told her her decision frustrated me, she looked me dead in the eye and said, “this isn’t about you, it’s about me.”
Yes, the stuff in the house has been getting short shrift - so I made the decision to pick up the slack where I never have before, and that is what I mentioned in our discussion the other night. She said she has greatly appreciated it, and that a great burden has been taken off her shoulders, and I vow to keep it up, and it is not that I am helping her with stuff around the house, it’s just that it is part of my role around here.
She wants me to do it. She just gets mad if I go to make a mortgage payment and our bank account is drained until our next paycheck. Not seeming to understand how much I just contributed to our retirement and our children’s inheritance.
To note, there have been times where the day job greatly supported the farming business - those times ended around 2018. Farming income is now gravy around our wages. And she has never said anything about it taking too much time, I’m literally a four by four farmer, four part time weeks in the spring, four part time weeks in the fall, put the stuff away and wait until next year.
Is it that she doesn’t understand the importance of paying the mortgage, or that she’s upset that money she expected to be able to spend suddenly disappeared?
Also, i think of paying the mortgage as “we need to do this so we can keep living here”, not, “this will increase our children’s inheritance”. I can completely understand prioritizing food tomorrow over what the kids might inherit. But… that doesn’t seem relevant to a mortgage payment.
Anyway, if it’s about (or partly about) violating her expectations, maybe it would help to split the bank account into scheduled/required stuff you know about in advance (mortgage, electricity, insurance…) and more voluntary/adjustable stuff, like food and clothing. Then you would pay the mortgage out of one account, and the other account, that she plans to spend, would never suddenly be depleted.
I’m really not joking about YNAB. It might help her to understand why you make the financial decisions you do. I’m not naturally a very financially savvy person, but YNAB really turned things around for me. I’ve been using it for maybe 12 years and went from financially clueless to being predominantly in charge of the financial planning. My husband manages the minutiae of the investments, but the every day budget and long-term planning is my domain. (I’m not saying he doesn’t participate in long-term planning decisions, I’m saying once we decide, I am responsible for executing them.) Something like that might make it clearer to her how many dollars you have available to do which jobs. I’m recommending it because it doesn’t sound like she understands how money works. She could even be responsible for a portion of that budget so that your finances feel more like a shared venture.
It’s about the second part. The money seemingly disappeared and she doesn’t like it. BTW, our house is paid for. The mortgage payments are on farm land I bought before I knew her (which has more than doubled in value), so that’s why it is our children’s inheritance. We are about to pay off one piece nine years early and have 130 acres free and clear.
So… Does she even agree that building equity for your kids is more important than current spending? And if you are paying it off early (something we did with our home mortgage) you are paying faster than you “need to”.
So i think she has some reason to be miffed that money she expected to be able to spend is suddenly going away.
I haven’t read the budget book, but it sounds helpful. At any rate, if you DO agree on paying off the mortgage for that farmland (rather than selling it now, for example) then i really think it would be helpful if you segregated the money as it is deposited into bank accounts, so she can look at the account balances and know how much she can spend this month.
ISTM that you two have been moving in different orbits from the very beginning. You inform but don’t discuss. When you changed jobs, you made the decision on your own. True, it was a no-brainer, but you followed through on it without talking to her first–not to get permission, just to communicate. You are not a team.
You seem to have a very traditional family: the husband works hard to bring in money to support the family and provide for the future. That’s his job. The wife raises the kids and (until recently for you), handles the home front on her own. That’s her job. But that job doesn’t pay, so she also has a second job–not a career, just a job, and an unfulfilling one. Though you both work hard, YOU have a career, and YOU get to do something in addition that you love and that brings in money.
Frankly, I bet she’s exhausted. Homemaking is mostly tedious stuff that has to be done over and over and earns little appreciation. (“WOW, this bathroom floor is clean, honey!” is not something you hear often…OK, at all.) It’s 24/7 with no days off and no retirement. She’s been pulling that second shift for years now. The essential oils plan is her way of having a career and providing income, and she can do it around her homemaking job, she thinks. And because of that separate orbit thing, she announces stuff like this rather than discussing it.
You two need to renegotiate your contract. You might start by asking her what she wants, what she really, really wants.
Why not? Ignoring the possible losses from a MLM scheme, do you make enough money to support the family in a comfortable lifestyle? If so, why should her working matter one way or the other? If your salary alone is not enough, I understand your position - at that point you HAVE to have two incomes, and a SAHM with a possible side-hustle might not be enough. If your income is enough for you to be the sole provider, and your wife is unhappy working and your son seems to need more attention, then why does the possibility of being the sole provider bother you?
I make enough to be sole provider for our family if necessary. My attitude has always been that my wife should feel fulfilled. Most of our marriage, she worked. I joked she had better job titles (comptroller for a small company, for example), but I made more money. Due to changing work environments and changing family situation, she didn’t work for a few years. As the kids got a little older, she took a job as an aide at a local school. She is now working in a special needs room making absolutely crap pay, but being fulfilled with the job. Yeah, I agree with you that your wife unilaterally deciding to quit work is obnoxious, but if you can afford it, and if the situation warrants it, being sole provider shouldn’t bother you.
I was the sole provider for about a decade. My husband was a stay at home dad. And it was awesome! I came home to supper, the shopping just happened, if the car needed to go to the shop he took care of it.
If you can afford to support a full-time stay-at-home spouse it’s a very nice situation for the one working outside the home
In his defense, just based on my marriage, it seems that being the sole breadwinner feels like an incredible amount of pressure. If you screw it up or are rendered unable to work, the impact on your family will be catastrophic. It also mitigates risk to have both partners working. I think as my family has gained financial stability it doesn’t bother my husband as much to consider being the sole breadwinner - even though I choose to work part-time, he’s said before he could accept me being a SAHM, and will eventually support me having a go at fiction writing. But there have been times in the past where it really stressed him out. I think it ties into prescribed gender roles for men in particular, as being the breadwinner can more easily get tied up in the idea of what it means to be a man, so failing in that regard is often seen as failing as a man, which is why unemployment hits men harder than women. Just an observation.
I’m old enough to remember all of the TV tropes about husband being upset that wife is working. By the time I was an adult, it was less of a factor, but still showed up some. This conversation is a breath of fresh air. It shows how far our society has come, from “A woman’s place is in the home” to “I can’t believe my wife doesn’t want to work”.
Definitely agreed. For most of the first 20 years of our marriage, both my wife and I worked – my job (market researcher, then advertising strategist) brought in a lot more money than her job (teacher at a small, church-owned elementary school), but the salary she brought in was still important to our budget.
A decade ago, she lost her job, due to political shenanigans that went on at that school. She spent several months debating with herself, whether she wanted to continue teaching, or do something else entirely, but her internal question of “what do I want to do next” wound up being answered with, “I don’t want to do anything,” and she never discussed it with me. Sitting on the couch, watching TV, and playing with our cat became what she did, as a unilateral decision on her part.
She hasn’t worked since 2012, and I’ve been the sole breadwinner since. At the beginning of 2015, I lost my job when my employer cut staff, and it took me four-plus months to find a new job. I made sure she understood our financial situation, that we would not be able to afford having no income for an extended period of time, and that it would be a really good idea if she picked up even a part-time job, while I spent my time focusing on landing a new job. She made a couple of very half-hearted inquiries about jobs (e.g., getting a job application when she went to Petco to buy cat food), but she did not really pursue it at all, despite my repeated requests.
Ah. You must just be doing grain crops, and not on a complicated rotation.
Do you pay the same amount every month, so it’s predictable? Or are you paying it off early by paying more some months than others; and, if so, are you discussing with her before doing so how much extra to pay in each month?
It’s also nice to see someone actually considering the wife’s unmet need that could be resulting in this harebrained scheme, versus assuming the worst. And it’s nice to hear all kinds of perspectives on ways to make a marriage work.
As for my job, it barely pays for childcare (currently we have a nanny due to COVID). I calculated that after childcare, I make $4/hour. So it really would be a wash if I quit. But I like my job and don’t want to quit. It provides a level of satisfaction I can’t get at home. So for now, I remain employed.
This is my experience as well. My wife quit her job when our child was in elementary school because her new boss wouldn’t support a flexible work arrangement and her job location was moved ten miles further away into downtown, which made the commute longer but more important, extremely variable.
I used to travel a lot for work in those days, so getting the sprog to and from school and to various activities was very stressful. And there was no backstop in case she got caught up in a horrible traffic jam.
But as soon as she quit, reducing our household income by 40%, the stress level for me exploded. The endless rounds of office politics, reorganizations, potential layoffs, etc. were a lot more stressful because I could no longer contemplate just walking away. She was supposed to be doing various more flexible things (Real Estate Agent, Financial Planning, Tax Preparation, Interpretation Services) but none of these came close to replacing her salary + bonus. Our lifestyle wasn’t hampered, but our savings went down dramatically. Effectively we were saving 100% of her after tax income, plus her max 401k.
Five or six years later my wife was SHOCKED when reviewing our financial situation, my projected retirement date was pushed out by five years, and our projected income in retirement was significantly lower. Somehow when she was making the decision the cumulative effect of 15 years of lost peak earnings and savings was not so obvious. We cut out the house cleaning and lawn mowing service to save money, but that is a proverbial drop in the bucket ($5k savings vs $50k in lost NET income). But I accepted that she is not making a purely dollars and cents decision. She has more flexibility to engage in religious activities, charitable/community work and gardening as the kid has grown older and more independent. She’s basically borrowing quality of life from the future. We will not be traveling the country and world in our late 50s, early 60s as we once envisaged.
Reading other people’s posts reminds me that it WAS a lot more stressful to be the sole breadwinner when my employer had its many re-orgs. And I lost about 20 pounds from stress when I was given notice.
Still, most of the time we weren’t embroiled in re-orgs, and I did feel reasonably secure in my employment. And the day-to-day life was great.
The truth about us is we have financial privileges other people just don’t, that we didn’t earn, and it makes it a lot easier to take financial risks. With retirement and my son’s college pretty much taken care of, the only real impact of me quitting my job would be a longer wait to make a down payment on a house. My husband is also self-employed in a stable field with a very high demand. If he ever lost the ability to draw income, it would mean either he was severely disabled, or that civilization had collapsed.
My husband and I first started talking about our long-term financial goals and gender role expectations when we started dating, at 19 years old. He comes from an extraordinarily wealthy family and mine was pretty poor. So I would say, “I want to be well off some day,” meaning “comfortably middle class” and he would respond, “No, I don’t care about being well off,” because his idea of “well-off” was a level of ostentatious wealth my little mind could not comprehend. Eventually we put down real numbers, and they were more or less the same numbers! It’s all relative, isn’t it? And one reason our marriage has worked, and that I fell in love, is that we both had a very closely aligned idea of how successful relationships work. We both knew that issues of quality of life, and who worked, and how childcare was distributed, were major factors in marital stability. And we cared about that stuff even then.
Now, things didn’t turn out exactly as we envisioned… they never do. I envisioned myself in a high-powered career working full time, and had certain notions about not wanting to expend too much energy on child-related stuff. I wanted kids, but I didn’t realize that having kids changes what you care about. It’s like a whole other universe of priorities. So it’s an ongoing negotiation.
Choosing to live the life you want to live when you’re younger, at the risk of not being able to when you’re older, strikes me as an option no more unreasonable to choose than living a miserable life for forty years in the hope of being able to have a great retirement.
Of course, such decisions affect one’s partner if one has one, so they should be joint decisions. But I think they should be joint decisions based on the recognition that there are good arguments in both directions. (Which Mighty_Mouse’s post reads to me as acknowledging.)