I pay my wife to do my laundry | Hacker News Reader

I pay my wife to do my laundry

money.cnn.com

31 pointsjwwest30 comments

Very appropriate day to post this.

In my house, I do most of the cooking, the dishes and the laundry. (The latter is because, being one of these work-at-home laptop-bound types, I'm at home a lot.) My girlfriend tends to vacuum and tidy more. But none of this is because we've established an internal market in our home and relationship. Between the two of us, we do what's right for each other, and it just works out.

This applies just as well to startup co-founders as it does to marriages. You want to find someone whose best interests you want to act in, and who will act in yours. Life's too short to be negotiating about who's going to wash the dishes, or who's going to pick up the mail. When you're emotionally invested in a person, an organization, a project or a cause, you'll do the right thing for it. And that's the kind of person you want to be in any kind of relationship with.

Important man: I am the head of my household! I make all the important decisions such as our family's position on the world's important political, economic, and cultural issues.

My wife makes all the little decisions. Like where we'll live, how we'll spend our money, what we'll eat, and where our kids go to school.

The original author would deserve the credit, but upvoted for being relevant. :)

> Because I like to dine out more than Kris does, for instance, I pay for most of our restaurant meals. In return, she pays for most of the groceries.

I do something similar with my housemates. They usually buy the meat, because I don't like to pay for good stuff. I usually buy the milk and vegetables. It's not an explicit agreement, that's just how it happened.

It actually works out the same as if I was paying more for meat than I want to. But I'm happier than I would be in that situation.

This seems foolish from a purely financial standpoint. Often times interest rates are tiered and you can get significantly higher rates with the more money you have in a single account.

They should combine them. They could keep pretending they have separate accounts and just write checks for what they owe, just have it come out of a single savings account.

I'd gladly pay the loss of interest rate for the added convenience of not having an excel spreadsheet which needs to be updated at every purchase.

Mint will update that spreadsheet for you.

You still have to decide who's expense each item is. I've had common accounts with my business partner for 7 years... trust me, it's bad. We're lucky we don't really care about exactly how much each of us made, because we don't know. Since changing banks a year ago and getting separate accounts things have been heavenly. We just opened a separate account to store VAT (european sales tax) and didn't even blink at the expense.

I'm guessing there aren't any substantial savings that would attract better rates in this case. He's been "deep in debt" and has a blog post about how he's spending a third of his income on his car.. (another post last year suggests it'll take "years" for him to pay off his debts)

The car post was written by someone else. It seems to have been quite a long time ago that he was deep in debt. I don't know what other post you have in mind, but quite a lot of the stuff on his blog is written by other people. According to http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2007/12/03/free-at-last-sa... (written in 2007) his only debt at that point was his mortgage.

So I've no idea what state his finances are in now, but it doesn't sound to me like he's desperately short of money.

(I had a quick look at other stuff on his blog, and I'd guess he has at least a few tens of thousands of dollars in cash. There's a post from April 2008 saying that he's got $5k in his "emergency fund" and aims to make it $10k by the end of that year, for instance.)

Not fighting with your spouse about money has to be worth something.

'separate accounts' != 'separate investing'

As I understood it, his 'separate accounts' just means they keep separate 'books', so to speak. I have 'separate accounts' from my business partners, but when I see an opportunity for which I need more cash than I have (or that is more profitable for higher amounts), I can still team up with them for mutual benefit.

My wife and I have joint finances (she's a stay at home mom), but we each have an allowance. We each get money each month that is 100% ours. We don't need to consult with each other about how it's spent. She can burn it for all I care. It gives us enough freedom to make purchases we don't agree on (unspent money rolls over, so one can save up if needed). Meanwhile, we are both very involved in all other financial decision, with all disagreements settled in favor of the more conservative party.

The title is a bit too much in my opinion. I regularly come across couples where expenses are taken note of, and the wife has to pay back the half of it in case she doesn't have money. (Not necessarily the women owes money, but men tend to be more money-centric in my observations.)

And when I say half, I really mean it. If a bread cost $1.4 3 weeks ago (in Middle Europe at least, converted to USD), she is in debt of $0.7. This situation is supposed to be rare, but who knows.

I also heard another story, where the husband earned some decent amount of cash, the wife was at home with the child getting national aid only. The man told her to get back to work or he won't pay the bills.

I don't know where this twisted way of thinking comes from, but it's really depressing. And there are more and more people who wouldn't enter marriage without a written contract.

I just can't understand.

Seems strange and impersonal, but I know JD a bit and he's a great guy, so I imagine that this is one of those stories that sounds more dramatic than it really is.

I fail to see anything dramatic in this particular story. He an his wife are happy. They don't reproach or regret. They feel honest about themselves.

Well though the story isn't dramatic, the article title is crafted to be linkbait, so it sounds more dramatic than it really is.

This is where companies like Laundry Locker in SF really help out.

Must not be Asian. My friends give their wives all their money.

They must be very trusting (or have typically financially literate wives). If I were to do this, it'd confirm the worst: I'd gone insane.. :-)

I wonder if they have a choice in the matter.

I'm guessing the implication is the wives employ browbeating.

In Japan that's the default. Wife takes care of the budget and gives a monthly "allowance" to the husband.

I don't know what you mean by financially literate, but they don't have to know much about investments or interest rates. Their job is to set a budget and stick to it every month. Most people will avoid getting deep into debt except for large purchases such as a house or a car, and savings account's interest rates are practically 0%. So being good at managing a budget is nearly all that matters.

There's even more to that story. It's true that the wife takes care of the salary and gives a monthly allowance to the husband. But whenever he files expense reports to his employer, he is reimbursed to a separate account that only he has access to and his wife has no insight into.

But he is dependent on her household management to such a degree that one of the main causes for homelessness is men being abandoned by their wifes in late years when the kids have flown out. He is unable to even cook rice, let alone pay the electrical bill or rent. So he ends up in the street, sometimes with his employment intact.

Suffice to say, this is not true for all men, but common enough to be a known order of events.

> He is unable to even cook rice, let alone pay the electrical bill or rent. So he ends up in the street, sometimes with his employment intact.

Lol, what? I can't tell if you're serious. Just because men depend on women for budgeting and house chores doesn't mean that they have to be homeless after a separation.

+1 to that "LOL what?" I don't buy the whole "if you don't normally handle the house that you can't figure it out when you have to" idea. If someone can't figure that stuff out, they have bigger problems then paying the bill or rent.

Not all people "on the streets" are entirely there against their wills. It's not like they're trying to get off the streets every day, and just can't, instead, they're hanging out, talking with their friends, and have, in general, adapted to a new setting.

> In Japan that's the default. Wife takes care of the budget and gives a monthly "allowance" to the husband.

That sounds familiar. When I worked in Seoul at a Korean company, the smaller unscheduled bonuses were rewarded in cash. That way the husbands who so desired could go to hostess clubs and room salons on their own dime without the knowledge of their wives, who held the purse strings.

There are plenty of apparent paradoxes like this in Korean society. As a generalization, the men are deeply devoted to their wives and family and will kill themselves at work to afford extra tuition for their pre-school children. But many of them see no contradiction between that level of devotion and letting off steam with prostitutes once a month at hwaeshik.

When I was in Japan, it was common for the married guys to buy the single guys lunch. The single guys would then repay the married guys in beer later. Lunch came off the paycheque automatically before the wife got the money, whereas beer came out of the allowance.

> My friends give their wives all their money.

Isn't this how things are done in a normal relation? I mean not necessarily giving the money to your wife, but having both yours and your wife's money in the same pool.

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