Partner choice and choice whether to have children are other critical considerations in cost control.
For example, my wife won't let me consider relocating and spends basically all her money on hobbies. This limits my job options to locally available ones (not a great area) and that I can't get a less stressful job because it pays less and I need my current salary to pay all the bills.
Another good example is that she said I should keep my nice car and keep doing track days when she found out I was going to sell it. Well, were getting married and having a kid. With what money am I expected to do all this? It had to be sold for the budget to work.
I can be. She complains about our current 1800sf house being too small.
Good relationships require clear communication and some semblance of equality.
If you're serious about staying with her, then you need to balance your needs against hers. It's a perfectly valid thing to say "I hate my job. I'm looking for one I enjoy more that pays less. If that happens, I won't be able to pay for your horse. If you want to keep your horse, we need to find a way to balance the budget."
Either she cares about you and has never developed financial muscles, in which case you two can get through with some hard decisions and be happier.
Or she doesn't care about you, and you should split.
(Said as a child of divorce)
Relationships aren't 50/50 in each area, but the effort across everything should be similar on both sides. Otherwise someone is taking advantage of their partner, imho.
I grew up with divorced parents who were together longer than they should've been and let me tell you, kids know. They absolutely know when their parents are together but can't stand each other and what's worse, they may assume it's their fault.
Kids are more perceptive than anyone gives them credit for.
Edit: "around here" being Australia and New Zealand
I grew up with parents who divorced when I was 18 months old when it became clear they did not love each other anymore. But they both wanted the best for me, and didn't do the petty shit I've heard about other couples where they shit-talked each other to the kid or something. They split time with me evenly.
They both eventually got re-married and are very happy and I have no regrets about how my childhood went in that regard.
You are choosing to be a victim here.
You should seek out real help, either a therapist or marriage counselor. There's no actual reason for you to stay in your current broken state. Your made up reasons are equal parts bullshit and naivety.
It's tough trying to get someone to see your PoV. Maybe do a spreadsheet with numbers to show her how you could get ahead elsewhere, keeping in mind her hobby. Big houses suck. Literally. Ours is ~2500sf and the upkeep is ridiculous. Maybe sell it as, "we could both do more with our respective hobbies if we had a cheaper outlay every month. We can only be in one room at a time, so having a lavish house is more to impress others than for our own benefit. I encourage you to pursue your hobby (within reason/set a budget maybe). Set a budget for you both outside of essential spending (housing/utilities/medical) and stick to it. I now no longer buy computers. I buy RPis and do things with them. They have a command line. I'm happy. My wife gets her happiness from attending sports games of our children. Her other hobby is gaming. Sell the idea of moving to a cheaper state with less taxes/cheaper property taxes and downsizing but keeping her hobby. It's all about compromise (but not your dignity). Remember, love is not a sentiment or emotion, it's an act of the will. Love wills the good of the other for the other. Find a way to make you both "happy" while giving you both what you want. I'm sure a nice, expensive house with high taxes and ugly upkeep costs would take a back seat to your wife's hobby (at least I would hope it would). Chart it out with numbers and present them. You owe it to yourself to stand up and set the tone, but do so with respect and tangible ideas that you can execute on. Everyone has great ideas, but almost no one can execute on them well.
There is a not insignificant chance your Southern wife will be incredibly miserable in the PNW. It is gorgeous and green but it is also grey, and if your wife has not lived in similar conditions before, it is very possible that the lack of Actual Sun will start giving her heavy seasonal depression.
A huge sun lamp will help. So will regular megadoses of vitamin D. But she may be like me and find that even with that, the urge to kill herself gets louder and louder every winter.
I moved back to my very culturally weird Southern birthplace a couple of years ago and that urge completely vanished.
Good luck finding a way to make both of you happy with where you live. :)
Also, you should keep your eyes peeled for remote jobs.
Nope, the courts will force child support and probably alimony based on the current job rather than some lower paying job one might get during/after any divorce.
Alimony probably isn't going to be a big deal, since I'm assuming by the age of your child you haven't been married for too long.
I feel exactly like this.
My wife has basically changed what she wants (or stopped hiding it) now that we are married. She wants a big fancy house and she wants to live in an suburbanized and expensive area. She originally told me she wants to live in the country and own land. This area isn't the country and we can't afford land around here.
She doesn't care about her spending. She has never been required to support herself or even live alone. She would rather spend a lot on a her expensive horse hobby than contribute to our kid's college or our shared bills. By expensive I mean she spends as much or more each month than I do on the mortgage. One month of her hobby expenses equals what I spend in an entire year on hobbies, and many of my hobbies have a return on investment (like foraging/cultivating mushrooms, growing a garden, etc).
I've come to accept that I will be stuck here and miserable. I don't see myself living past 50 in this condition, so I just have to endure this until then. I don't really see much reason to try extending that either.
I've seen couples drift apart pretty quickly once their daily experiences diverge.
If she spends all day working at an office, and he spends all day homemaking and with the kids, then each forgets what the other really does.
"The office" becomes an abstract place that someone just goes and isn't stressful at all. "The home" and "the kids" just magically take care of themselves and don't require much work.
Dual income has its own problems, but it seems a healthier default in terms of reminding people that work is... work.
This entire post, if it's anywhere close to objective truth, is wildly alarming!
On top of that if there are any kids he will be required to take up a portion of her only responsibility.
* Statistics-based assumption
My father in law was in a coma for a while and the child support payments stopped and he went broke from the lack of job and medical bills. They arrested him multiple times after that because he wasn't paying. Of course that gave him a criminal record and made it much harder to get a job.
I was in a situation freakishly similar to yours for over 10 years. In late 2019 I left her, and while it was one of the hardest decisions of my life, definitely the hardest day of my life, and the road to a mentally healthy(er) position has been ongoing, it has proved to be a wise decision. I spend far less of my day feeling resentful, unvalued, and unvalidated, both individually and in my new relationship. In my own time and in counseling with a professional, I have learned many lessons about myself, what I want out of life and in a partner, and how to be my own advocate.
I deeply empathize with your position and you deserve to be happier. I hope this experience of mine might give you some vicarious experience to draw from, and I encourage you to consider making a change.
For now, just because you're married doesn't mean you have to have complete sharing of finances. Get your finances completely separate. Create your own bank account; have your salary go there. Cancel any shared credit cards. Lock your credit report so new accounts cannot be made using your social security.
Then, offer to pay 1/2 the mortgage each month; or, better yet, let her pay the full amount from her own wages.
1) telling her how you feel, in the form of "I feel X when you do Y". For example, "I feel unvalued when you spend more on your horse than we do on the mortgage. I feel scared for our kid's future when you prioritize your expensive horse over saving for his/her education. I feel trapped when you spend the money I make without deciding together how to spend it." It can be hard to know exactly how these actions make you feel unless you've practiced thinking about it, so you might want to write it down and revise it over a week or two. Also, depending on how your wife takes feedback, you might want to have discussions of just one at a time.
2) marriage counseling.
3) setting boundaries: "my standard of being treated is <...>" and take steps to "enforce" them. The easier levels are along the lines of "I want to be talked to respectfully, so I will leave the room when you do not, but when you are ready to talk respectfully, come and get me." I'm not sure how you communicate "I think our budget should look 25% house, 20% food/clothes, 10% retirement, 10% kids education, etc, which leaves $X for optional things like horse; if you need more than that you'll need to get a job" without being unilateral, though. But you have some financial values/boundaries that are being crossed and you need to communicate / enforce those.
4) It would be a bad sign if your wife didn't respond positively to any of the above. However, even in that case you could get counseling for yourself on how to respond healthily, and you are also likely to get insight into why your wife is behaving this way (the counselor might notice consistent signs of co-dependency, for instance).
5) Read pre-modern stories about how spouses handled toxic behavior. (The quasi-mythic ones that start off "There was once a woman in ... whose husband ...") I've read a few Japanese stories about wives that change the incentives for their husbands and they stop being drunkards and start being productive. (There's fewer stories the other way, but those exist, too.) Some of these stories are quite creative solutions; maybe something like that would work with your wife.
Don't just stay stuck and miserable, though. There are many ways to defeat the giants.
Welp, I know what I'm going to be lying here thinking about for the next several hours.
Would you want your child to grow up to feel the way you do now? You're giving them the lesson plan right now.
That you're posting this on HN suggests that you would really like to have someone to talk to about this, at the very least to feel heard about it.
From personal experience, consider a therapist for a while - starting just on your own. There's nothing wrong with you, but you're in a sticky situation and are unhappy, and you're worried about the implications for your daughter and your own longevity. It can be really nice to have someone to talk through this stuff with, especially when it might be tough to talk with your wife about it, at least at this point, if she's causing the problem. I don't know about you, but it helps me mentally figure out what to do when I can talk about it, and (good) therapists are good at pulling our thoughts out and letting us think about all the angles.
It's pretty low stakes, and while they do cost some money, it's not a ton (compared to the horses!). And it can really help you think through the particulars of your situation over time, which it's tough for any of us here on HN to do, and when it's time to do the tough stuff - like broaching the subject with your wife - you have got someone in the therapist who knows the background and can help you deal with any fallout.
Good luck. You deserve a happy life. Your daughter deserves a good future. We only get one shot at this.
Too many parents don't want to be in the position they're in for whatever reason and didn't take the time to figure out whether they really want to have kids.
You imagine the alternative as staying in the spot you were in, but of course that's impossible. There are all kinds of random encounters and unknown unknowns that would have happened.
Also, kids need doctors, interests (books or toys), durable goods (clothes and furniture) and more to thrive.
Editing to say that these are not the $500,000 RVs that retired people holiday in. They are kitchen-sized campers (for lack of a better term) that may be the size of 6-8 cubicles. They need outside water connections which many don't have, and they almost always need propane attachments. Many have composting toilets which the owner needs to clean out, as they cannot connect to the sewer lines.
Kids aren't cheap if you want to keep up with your socioeconomic class. And by far the biggest cost is the extra you pay for a house to be located near other high earners so that the schools your kids go to is filled with kids of other high earners.
I’ve never known a doctor to charge less than $200 per visit with or without insurance.
I make less money than someone in the US, but daycare for me is 250 euro (it was 500 until 3 years old) and public daycare would be cheaper still. Visiting the doctor for a random virus brought back from school costs exactly 0 (a private visit would be around 100 euros). An orthodontist, if needed, would be the only major expense for a child apart from clothing and food.
University will be about 4000 euros a year at most (and would be cheaper if I earned less).
So raising a kid who's middle or upper class is actually quite expensive, and that's part of why low income and high income families have more kids than middle income families. https://qz.com/1125805/the-reason-the-richest-women-in-the-u...
You have to figure out how to get food & shelter and follow local laws. Everything else is unequivocally optional. I would argue that "not seen as optional" is just a way of saying "I don't own up to my choices."
As an engineering student, you can also get paid internships each summer (can often pay >$10k) or can be a paid research assistant for a professor during the year for ~10 hours week (pays for groceries each week).
Editing to say that if you make the military a career, you can literally save almost your entire salary if your personal peccadilloes are minimal. I knew guys that decided 4 years was enough and emerged after 4 years with over 50k in savings while paying nothing and they also got the BA/BSc degree on Uncle Sam's dime. They emerged debt free, degreed, and ready to start the next stage of their lives. Doing 8 years gets you a masters all the while doing nothing but work a job with everything paid for. At that rate, you might as well do 20, marry another member and have a steady retirement at 39 or 40 with money enabling you to pursue a job you really love because you can afford to live where you want. Bonus: Tri-Care military medical costs $500 year on retirement. Cannot touch that out here.
As someone who lived off-campus the entire time and regretted it, I do think that spending at least freshman year in dorms is a really good idea to make friends and get to know the school's culture and environment.
if you plan ahead and graduate in 4 years, and if you apply for many local/state scholarships (in my experience the national scholarships are a waste of time).
My advice to my younger self would also be to take more student loans so I wouldn't have to work. I had to work to pay tuition, but working made keeping up with school impossible. Catch 22.
This is counter to my experience. I was able to work part-time jobs just fine, and having that experience made me a much more competitive candidate upon graduation.
I would still have worked most if not all of my summers, but never more than 5 hours a week during the semesters. My job, which I actually really liked, demanded 20, which also required another 6-10 hours commuting on top of 5-8 hours of commuting to school.
I had also worked in tech for a year before starting school, so I was a bit less worried about having experience to list. And in the end it didn't matter because I started a company and ran that for 5 years instead.
You definitely can't pay for everything on 10 hours a week, but it at least pays the bar tab...
I went to a "very respectable" public land-grant university in my home state and today that school costs $15K a year outside of room and board ($35K/year for out-of-state), and students should live on-campus at minimum the first year--so let's say, best case, you're looking at $70K for in-state. Plus living expenses, and despite your claims elsewhere in-thread I can personally attest that part-time jobs even ten years ago took a bite out of but did not solve the problem of food, board, etc.--so we're probably talking closer to $100K when all is said and done.
Even if you assume some defraying of costs, a student loan bill of $50K (which was about what I left school with) is staggering for many non-technical folks, coming out of college looking at salaries closer to $40K than $100K when they can find a job at all. Further, the knock-on effects are financially hazardous. If you end up on income-based repayment because, y'know, jobs are hard to find unless you're a computer toucher and even then there probably aren't enough for everybody, you will be paying less-than-interest, and the principal only grows.
Put frankly, I would advise the cultivation of more empathy for those not as economically advantaged as you or me. This stuff is staggeringly, mind-wreckingly expensive for people who aren't in tech, and yet functionally required because of the structures we have allowed to be built.
> This stuff is staggeringly, mind-wreckingly expensive for people who aren't in tech, and yet functionally required because of the structures we have allowed to be built.
Society has always worked this way. Those who have rare skills get paid the most. Supply and demand and what not. Universities are gateways to advanced skills, especially in traditional occupations where equipment is often expensive (medical, chemical, mechanical, etc). The reason you go to a university is so that you can get advanced skills in order to make an advanced salary. It makes no sense to go to a university by default and come out with a degree that doesn't teach you advanced skills that get you a high wage. If the jobs that your degree are going to get you aren't going to pay for what that degree cost you then you made a poor decision by taking on that debt.
This sort of thing is why I believe basic economics should be a hard requirement in high school. You shouldn't be able to get a high school diploma without understanding the mechanisms of debt/leverage. So many people have screwed themselves over because they don't understand that the only reason to ever take on debt is to use it as leverage so that you can earn even more than the debt you took on. Any other reason is foolish.
It's really sad when you think about it, so many people would be way better off if they knew the definition of leverage. Such a simple concept, yet so powerful (it's funny how knowing about leverage gives one so much leverage in life).
Most of your post is pretty good, but I laughed aloud at this, tbh. The reason you go to a university is because your resume gets thrown out for almost any desk job--hell, for Starbucks--if you don't have a bachelor's.
It is functionally necessary. These aren't "rare skills". These are employer-mandated minimums, and it leaves people with that inflated student debt, encouraged and pushed upon them by their parents and by the expectations of society, to subsidize those employers' demands.
We are middle class and have two kids but our kids have close to no hobby expenses. Our son is vehemently anti-hobby and daughters dance and piano lessons are not really that expensive. On the other hand we have no-one close for whom we should "keep up appearances".
Government will pay for the kids degrees. Ditto for healthcare and the dentists for kids are excellent.
I know some kids play hockey or whatever and that can be a bit steep but never have I felt such would be a mandatory hobby. Neither of my kids really showed interest for any team sports and we gladly obliged not to force introduce them.
Sure you need to buy food for 4 persons and wash a bit more laundry, but that's about it when I think of the "overhead" caused by kids. The necessity for an apartment with a few more rooms is probably the biggest financial burden but loans are cheap.
The fact only one of us is capable of working due to health reasons is a much bigger issue financially than having kids.
Editing to say that kids are not too expensive if they're healthy. If you have children who have medical conditions, then all bets are off. What really pisses me off is the local school district always begging for money. I pay those thieves almost over $5000 year in property tax, since we live in an area with ridiculous property taxes. Whenever I've visited the school and my children have also seen this, they beg for school supplies, but the closets in all of my kid's classrooms are brimming with supplies. They spend more on sports than they do on education, which really irks me. Sports may be important, but nowhere near as education. 1% of 1% go on to play pro sports, but here they act as if sports are more important. Classes are let out early to watch games, yet the school district where we live is a poor performer academically. My own children are fine, but that's because we watch and are involved.
Colleague I knew in London literally spent more on daycare for his two kids than he did on his mortgage.
The other option is that one parent quits their job and stays home, but that is also a massive (opportunity) cost if you're both educated and have a decent career.
Now you may think it's worth 'paying' 100k a year to gain all the non-monetary benefits of staying at home and raising kids, but that is a separate discussion.
As I built my career, my lifestyle inflated, and so did the kid’s expenses. We make in 3 days what used to take us a month.
The kids get to share our lifestyle with us. It’s probably different for us because we’ve never been well off + not have kids.
You may say, oh well they can just get loans, true, but you can only get so much in federal loans before you have to get private, non dischargeable loans for ~ 7% interest.
Alternatively, you might say oh, they can just join the military. Only problem is the Air Force and Navy don't want little Johnny and now he's getting blown up doing patrols with the 3rd ID in Iraq (I lost my childhood best friend this way).
TLDR: If you don't want to help your kid pay for college or trade school, just don't have them. No one should have to go deeply in debt or put their lives at risk to earn a decent living.
Except, the minute you make any money, you lose this.
You can supplement with part-time work but that only gets you so far. As soon as you start making money on disability, you lose 1 dollar for every two. And the most you can make is $1260/month. At that point you lose Medicaid and any progress you've made is lost because insurance is way more than you are making.
You effectively top out at $1263 + $1260/2 = $1893/month. Rent is going to claim 1/3 to 1/2 that.
Where are the fade outs, and the incentives that will reward you for getting off the system, rather then punish you? It's a subject for a different thread at a different time.
For example in Pennsylvania:
https://healthbridges.info/hearing-aid-insurance-coverage-fo....
You can't get non-state insurance for hearing aids for kids, and they aren't cheap.