I'm here confirming the tired old stereotype that men earn more than their wives and have to pay all the bills I'm afraid!
DH earns £80k-ish in an engineering firm and I am an LSA in a local school so only work term time and finish at lunchtime so I can collect our DCs from school. I make £11k a year.
He works reasonable hours and we are pretty lucky he still has a lot of time for us.
If he lost his job, we'd leave the country I think and move to my home town which is significantly cheaper to live in. We are only here for his job and honestly, it wouldn't be my first choice to live here (London area) if it wasn't for that.
One day we might make our escape and I'd be happy for him to do zero work if he wanted. I want to train as a teacher in a few years and although the salary for that doesn't go far here, it does elsewhere.
We live cheap, we save a lot and we overpay on our mortgage. We will be able to be mortgage free on our (small) house within a few years when we will be in our early 40s. So we may be in a position for us to move or for him to go part time if I start making a full time salary around that time, as is the plan.
There is clearly a massive disparity in our wages, and we both take some responsibility for that. I gave up a lot for us to follow his career when we were just starting out. I finished at the same university with a decent degree with postgraduate study prospects, left my family where I was living in a nice, big house and rent free. We had to rent together in quite an expensive UK city. We were very, very broke and I always managed to pay half even on the shittest of salaries. His salary wasn't amazing at the beginning either. We also moved around a lot with his job and had to live in some remote areas with no family or friends or much of anything around. Every time we moved, I had to find a new job to pay rent. I knew what I was doing and was happy to do it because I knew his career was always going to be more promising than mine. I've always loved children and wanted to train to teach and be around for my own DCs as much as possible.
The reason I now work term time only is because of our young children. We don't want to have to use childcare full time (yet). They're still quite little and we have no family support with childcare at all. Yes, we could both work full time and they could do childcare from 7am till 6pm and I'm sure they'd be fine. I could go back to what I did before we had kids which was fairly long hours in an office. But as we don't strictly need to do that we are choosing not to.
I know people are often horrified on here when women confess they don't earn anywhere as much as their husbands, but that's life and it does seem to be quite common. If I could walk into a job which paid £80k tomorrow, obviously I'd take it, even if the hours were long. But that's completely unrealistic.
I'm not offended by the question btw but also enjoying some of the sarcastic answers 😂