To ask those who have high earning partners......

[Hollypies]

I’m shocked by the amount of women on MN with very high earning DP/DHs and I wonder, how did you meet and what is your life like? I can appreciate this is a little nosey, but after years of dating/being in relationships with men who are very low earners and with no ambitions in terms of their career....I’m very curious. I’ve always assumed that highly successful men/women usually mix with their own kind and meet an equally high earning spouse through their work or social circle... but thought it’d be interesting to ask!

mrscholley we’ll have to agree to disagree. You can’t work 60-70+ hours a week and tell me you are ever present for your children. Just for the record I do work, mostly 3 days a week, in what most people would describe as a high powered well paid job. What I’m not is the director or the CEO, because that would be a sacrifice I’m not prepared to make. I know a couple of ‘weekend’ mums. They kid themselves that they are around for their kids because they have sufficient control over their schedules to be able to do school drop offs and pick ups and get to the plays and to sports days, but they are always glued to their phones, always answering emails and calls, always up late, always tired (and ratty with DC). But there are only their in body. We can’t have it all.

@xenia

Money does tend to give you power and control. But not everyone makes megabucks, regardless of how hard they work. I was talking earlier about someone I know who basically worked part time for over £200k p/a. Yet nurses work ridiculous hours for under £30k. Student nurses do the same for Zero. I know, I know, you “chose” to do commercial law in London because you had the foresight at age 14 to know exactly what you wanted from life and what it would take to get it. Then you had the good fortune to be capable of doing what it took. You know how incredibly unusual you are don’t you? You sound, honestly, fabulous and I wish I was more like you. But most of us aren’t!

So, maybe you can use that superbrain of yours to appreciate why some of us would choose not to put their kids in childcare, so that they could PAY TO GO TO WORK.

That is what I would be doing if I went back to work. I’d be in minus figures after childcare. My children have no extended family too near by, so it’s really just us against the world.

I do take on board your advice that it’s better to earn your own money.

If you could just please indicate how a 36 yo mother of two young dcs with no childcare and minimal training and slightly odd degree, might go about instantly getting a job that would enable me to earn said money, (the same as my dh, which is well under £100k p/a, but pays the bills), I would be astonished!

We all choose our choices, and in doing so, choose our (possible) consequences. And we all choose according to our priorities, and our realities.

First of all it's not your cost - it's your husband's too so only feed 50% of the childcare cost as a deduction off your potential full time job.

So could you write a book? I wrote 30. It's not that hard. You just sit there and get on with it.

Could you work when your husband is a home - eg all day Saturday and Sunday in a shop or something?

Why does your husband earn more than you do? That's always an interesting question. Are we encouraging boys into high paid jobs and women into low paid ones because of sexism in society? Or do low paid women marry high paid men even if not consciously aware of it? Does it make the husbands feel better that the wife earns very little?

First of all it's not your cost - it's your husband's too so only feed 50% of the childcare cost as a deduction off your potential full time job.

So could you write a book? I wrote 30. It's not that hard. You just sit there and get on with it.

Could you work when your husband is a home - eg all day Saturday and Sunday in a shop or something?

Why does your husband earn more than you do? That's always an interesting question. Are we encouraging boys into high paid jobs and women into low paid ones because of sexism in society? Or do low paid women marry high paid men even if not consciously aware of it? Does it make the husbands feel better that the wife earns very little?

Well you can't do it straight away cup. I had 7 glorious years at home with the dc. Then got a part time job in an area that might lead to orof quals. Worked my socks off back at the bottom. Two years later tjey made me a full time job in a new role. Still low pay but the extra covered the au-pair. Then they supported my prof quals. Overall got promoted through 5 grades in 9 years. Moved on. Worked my socks off - got promoted through 5 grades in 6 years. Director now. 14 years - about what it woukd take to make partner in a law firm I guess. Doesn't come overnight, without planning or graft.

He earns more than me because he got excellent grades in STEM subjects at school and then university, while I got middling grades in arts and humanities. We met at university and even before we graduated, he was offered a job in a graduate scheme for a really big and interesting company. So we moved to where his job was and had to move around here and there. I had to take what I could depending on where we moved.

Yes, I have done work like evenings and weekends in shops and restaurants, but do you honestly think that is going to lead to a job which would pay the same as dh’s? I don’t! Frankly, it shouldn’t. There would be no justice if it did.

What it did do was meant that I never saw dh and saw less of my children, while really just paying me pocket money. Hours are unpredictable and poorly paid in those sorts of jobs. Being sent home a bit early if I wasn’t needed, rotary getting mixed up so I was called in when I had two children at home with me.

We actually have spare cash now, due to the aforementioned inheritance from my mum, so I may retrain. But I’ll be damned if I’m paying someone £££ to care for my children, so that I can go back to shit, dead end admin jobs and earn less than the cost of childcare. Nope.

I used to take every career opportunity I could, but soon realised that I was getting very little in return. Now I have children, I carefully consider opportunities as they present themselves. If it isn’t going to work for us or result in something extraordinary, I don’t take it.

If I had made different choices before we had dcs, maybe I would have some amazing career by now, but as it is, I have to make the best of what I have and I do not believe that going back to work come what may is necessarily the best. If I was going back to work in a highly paid and / or exciting / worthwhile / rewarding job, that would be one thing, but that’s not what I would be going back to.

And I know, what if dh divorces you etc etc? But what good would a weekend job in a shop do me then? How would that cover our bills and save our necks? It wouldn’t go near them.

True @ohtheroses, I think biding my time has never been my strong suit. But that’s precisely what I need to do in this case, as childcare costs will diminish as my children get older and go to school etc.

And YY @xenia, it’s our cost, not just mine, but overall the family would be in minus figures if I went back to work in the sort of job I had previously. So it’s the same thing really.

@CupOhTea, my thoughts exactly! And I don’t get Xenia’s logic, in our family we share finances, so me spending more than I earn on childcare, working 9-5 basically for free while someone else brings up my kids will also mean we are out of pocket at the end of each month. Does not make any sense. Especially when it’s a job with no (or minimal) career prospects.

But you do have to sacrifice your career if you want to be more than a weekend mum; and that is ultimately why many women don’t pursue careers

ODFOD. No one ever criticises a man for working, whereas a woman's place is in the wrong as this thread illustrates.

In terms of the shared cost, I think Xenia's right and you need to look also at the longer term impact, earning power etc rather than just the short term. However the issue is that a lot of people just can't afford it regardless of how you look at it.

DH is a very high earner. We met nearly twenty years ago when he didn't have a penny to his name.

Now he earns more than ten times what I earn - and I have a respectable job.

However I am much younger than he is. So when people first meet us they ALWAYS assume I'm a gold digger or a second trophy wife (which is comedy gold cos I'm nothing special.) I didn't want to have a baby or get married until I was in my thirties so being an older father exacerbates people's assumptions.

However when I see a couple in the street and she's much younger I make the same assumptions, I guess it's ingrained in society

But as I've always said it's a team effort. When we started our family I was burnt out as often happened in what I did and dh's were the better prospects. I wanted after two miscarriages to be a mummy and dh supported it. I put the effort into our family life to support his careeer which in turn had a positive effect on our family life. The suport he had from home empowered his success in a career that required 110% at the time he had to give 110%. Had either of us been less resillient it would not have worked.

However going back to work when money was not required cemented the team by giving me a professional outlet beyond the family. Fast forward to the children's later teenage years and many of the parents of the children's friends split lea ing women at 50ish who hadn't worked for 25/30 years high and dry and oretty much unemployable. For 20 years they had been too invested in children and schools and Farrow & Ball and theirs and their dh's lives had moved apart.

If dh were to decide to leave I am secure in my work and have a good pension accruing. Most importantly I can talk with the dc and give them advice about work on an equal footing and sometimes they will listen.

I know at least 2 couples were in their late 40s/50s that have broken up because the wife refused to work after the children has started school in 1 case and left home in the other. The men were very high earning and felt that they could no longer carry a passenger as it really wasn't what they had ever signed up for- they imagined that both would work equally when they married as newly qualified professionals.

Our really good friends are divorcing, and this is a huge part of it.

She, IMO, engineered a situation in which she was completely unemployable by taking a redundancy from a major consulting firm about 2-3 years before her first was born and now her youngest daughter is 12 and she's not back at work, so she's been off for nearly 20 years.

Her STBX was in M&A but he really couldn't deal with the pressure and he is now earning about a tenth of what he was and they have 3 kids in private school! Not a tenable situation.

They can't even speak without a lawyer now, so they're haemorrhaging money.

Yikes oilbarron. How awful.

I’m not saying that sort of thing never happens, but I think (hope) its highly unusual, as most women are not gold digging, lazy a-holes, just like most men are not evil pig bastards who want to use their wives for free childcare, (it would cost my husband for example a lot more than any salary I could realistically earn at the moment to pay for full time childcare for two dcs), and then do a runner as soon as the kids start school and the free childcare isn’t necessary anymore.

@ohtheroses that’s what I’m hoping to do as soon as it becomes financially viable. No, we don’t “need” the money, but I want to contribute financially when I can.

I don't think it's as much about cpntributing to finances tbh as it iis about maintaining some financial independence and agility of mind able to think beyond little Johnnie's place in the firsts.

I just think it's interesting why we seem always to end up with women earning less than men. So in the example above the next questions are

• why did the husband choose stem subjects and the wife did not? - was that sexism for example even if just subconscious - either in the family or at school ?

• why did the husband get very good school and university grades but not the wife? Is one lazier than the other? Do men have a higher IQ? Did she know she could rekly on a husband for money so no need for higher grades? Did she work less hard?

• did the husband subconsciously choose someone who would not earn much, with worse exam grades because that would suit the lifestyle he wanted?

The comments about anything below £100k in London is low is ridiculous.

Where do you think all of the people who work in the shops & restaurants, the teachers, nurses, the bin men etc live? Because I can tell you now, they are not on £100k.....

Stop with the snobbery, £100k is a great salary living in or out of London.... no need to sneer

I’m with OhTheRoses It’s a team effort and should be discussed and planned. It isn’t automatically the man who returns to work but surviving on a single income that is maternity pay isn't easy.

I think recognition that earning and childcare are shared responsibilities but one spouse will do more of each is essential.

Yes, upsetting as it might be, if you choose for both parents to work 9-5 or longer, with travel added in, then five days a week the children are being reared by strangers. That does rather make for weekend parenting and must be very stressful for all concerned. I think when couples have children the “I wants” have to go straight out of the window and fly back in as “we needs”.

Inevitably for some couples there is no choice as they have to pay the bills. For others, it is most definitely a lifestyle choice.

So basically women who work as nannies do not keep “agility of mind”? How patronising! Not everyone who works is a high flying lawyer or whatever, I helped my older DC to prepare for their A levels in science, (I have a maths degree), I go to lots of interesting events, volunteer, meet lots of interesting people through DC musical activities, meet up with my friends who are also ex-professionals. I live in a nice part of central London with an easy access to museums, galleries, lectures etc etc. I used to work in an office in a professional position before I had DC, it was not developing my mind, quite the opposite, I would never want to go back to that...

Xenia. I did STEM subjects, achieved much higher grades, was definitely the higher earner before children but then we couldn’t survive and raise our children as we wanted on maternity pay. Something had to give. We consciously chose that as a couple acting in the best interests of our family and our relationship.

No nursery in the world could offer the same quality of individualised care, scope of experiences or consistency of expectations.

Luckily now we’ll qualified women can renter the workplace and gain promotion after children. They can regain high earnings - albeit not quite as high as might have been. Then in our our case,:y husband was earning enough for me not to worry about my income and could just enjoy my job regardless of pay.

I just think it's interesting why we seem always to end up with women earning less than men.

It is interesting, because it's the living embodiment of the great controversy of our time, i.e. the gender pay gap.

In my experience, it's pretty nice to have one parent (which almost always winds up being the mother) at home and the years roll by and it's easy to maintain the status quo so often she just doesn't go back if money is not an issue.

She likes it, it's pretty fun to be a SAHM of school-aged children if money is not an issue, and the husband likes it if he perceives it as an equal partnership, which he may or may not.

I know a lot of nice guys who really don't view their long-term SAHM-wives as dead weight and value what they do, even though most of it might be really fun and hardly work at all (going to rugby matches, organising the household, dealing with familial social obligations i.e maybe there's a niece in town who needs to be taken to lunch and so on).

In the example of my friend, she was not really the prototype banker's wife, she didn't cope all that well with her kids and didn't organise the house and complained a lot about his hours and he wound up, rather unusually for a big muckety-muck in M&A, doing quite a bit of laundry and grocery shopping on the weekend and their marriage was a complete disaster.

But yes cupoftea their situation is extreme and I've not seen any other one like it.

AlaskanOilBaron I always said I wasn’t giving up a relatively highly paid and successful career to be a cleaner or housekeeper. I’d do my fair share but there was always an expectation that he’d have to do his share too....and we’d pay for cleaners/housekeepers.

I understand how a single salary/attitude sometimes doesn’t allow for that and the women by default becomes a skivvy but I don’t think I was ever prepared to accept that. That is where the problem lies not in having a SAHM. It is the assumption that the main childcare is also the washerwoman, cook and taxi service. Needs proper discussion before everyone feels resentful not afterwards.

AlaskanOilBaron I always said I wasn’t giving up a relatively highly paid and successful career to be a cleaner or housekeeper. I’d do my fair share but there was always an expectation that he’d have to do his share too....and we’d pay for cleaners/housekeepers.

Sure, that's what I meant by 'organise the house' - deal with the outsourcing.

I agree with alaskan

Her post certainly resonates in my case

I think a societal change is required so that its seen as more of an equal parenting thing...and i think its possibly more the case niw but wasnt so much when i stopped full time work 20 + years ago

Dh and i got about the same A levels wise (equally shit) neither of us got a degree. He took exams in his job because he had to, exams in mine were purely optional and I didn't want to

By the time i was pregnant i was on about 14k and dh on about 30k. We both wanted a parent to stay at home and to a certain extent i was the default.

We were undoubtedly influenced by 'mother looks after the babies' and ive tried not to do that with my children

Ive worked in very small part time jobs to fit round the children, a dinner lady for example and now 6 hours in a shop which i am looking to give up as well

I will never work full time and I can't see how i will ever get a well paid/interesting job in the future

So a mix of reasons really

I agree with alaskan

Her post certainly resonates in my case

This is what I'd like to hear from Rufus on a Brexit thread, but it ain't happening.