Financial inequality in modern marriages

[Drunkenduck]

I seem to be in a minority in that all finances in our household are shared. My husband earns more than I do since I went part-time since having our eldest child. When both children begin school, I will contemplate working full time again, provided I can still be a school gate parent a few times per week and avoid the expense of wrap around care if possible.

We both pay into a family pot (he pays more) and both of us have the same amount of individual disposable income at the end of the month of around £250. He doesn't have to worry about school drop offs or pick ups, we don't need to pay for wrap around care due to the flexibility of my own work. He recognises me as doing unpaid work for our family and so shares his earnings.

I am saddened to learn that this isn't the case for most other families around me, apart from a few christian families that we know who do equally share their finances. We are not christians.

There's very much a "his money/her money" mentality. My SIL is currently on maternity leave and has no money to buy herself new work clothes for when she returns to work next month. Her husband however is currently on a stag do in Amsterdam.

Another friend of mine has been made redundant and we took our children to a free story telling event on Friday where you can buy toast. After buying my toast, she bought hers and revealed to me that she had spent her "last 25p" and had no money to get her hair cut and that her clothes have holes in but she can't replace them. I assumed at first that their family finances were short but later discovered that her husband has his own disposable income that she said she "can't expect him to share" with her.

I recently broached unequal finances with my other SIL who does work FT and earns around the same amount as her husband and she was also of the mindset that not sharing finances equally is ok! She said "a woman chooses to work part-time so why should her husband have to share his hard earned money with her." She doesn't have children but is pregnant so I don't think she understands yet the unpaid work that women do as mothers and homemakers, but she was very adamant that family money didn't exist and that women should "deal with the consequences of their choices not to work enough." She doesn't know that my husband (her brother) shares his finances equally with me- I didn't feel I could tell her after her strong opinions on the matter! But I'm so saddened by this.

What are these people thinking the mother/woman is doing when she chooses to work part-time to care for young children. I guess some men may not be happy with the arrangement if they don't agree to it and so won't share finances, but I don't see these men stepping up to be hands on fathers either so what choice are they giving their wives?

From the stories I've heard recently, I'm embarrassed to tell people that my husband and I pool finances and share everything equally. Surely, this isn't right?!

I absolutely understand that different arrangements work for different families but I hate hearing women (and it's pretty much always women) talking about having lees money than their dh/dp.

A friend of mine can't even book or decide on a holiday it's completely his decision and at his discretion as he's the main earner and she has no access to his money. She's expected to be very grateful if he books something.

I think the idea that adults should be self sufficient is great, but I also think if you chose to have children with someone you have to recognise the value of the reproductive process and the impact that can have, without making it in to a transaction.

We have a setup like yours OP. DH has better earning potential than me because of the nature of his work. I have a job that offers the flexibility to work around kids and school. Both our contributions are valued equally and we share all money and all domestic labour. All our money goes into the shared pot then we get an equal amount of spending money to ourselves each month.

It works for us.

All of my married/long term partnered friends have a set-up like yours op.
I think you remember the ones that don't because it's quite shocking when it's not equal, and not the idea of marriage/partnership that most people would like (for people who have only married once - I get it's more complicated if you marry again)

Madness. I also find when the woman earns more it's all shared.

I'm the same at you OP
DH has never questioned any of my spending in last 30 years of marriage (he does check credit cards/bank statements daily to make sure we are not being defrauded - spotted £900 taken from our bank by 5 years ago and asked if it was me and it was a fraud - we've never been to Maidenhead!!)
I don't buy big ticket stuff without his input but that's about how a relationship works not the money and is home stuff like patio furniture that we'd choose together anyway

Drunkenduck

re your comment:

"Another friend of mine has been made redundant and we took our children to a free story telling event on Friday where you can buy toast. After buying my toast, she bought hers and revealed to me that she had spent her "last 25p" and had no money to get her hair cut and that her clothes have holes in but she can't replace them. I assumed at first that their family finances were short but later discovered that her husband has his own disposable income that she said she "can't expect him to share" with her".

Financial control within a marriage or relationship is a very real but not always a readily recognised form of abuse.

Your friend is in a controlling relationship and controlling behaviour is abusive behaviour. I would try and keep in touch with this particular woman and see if she is open to the possibility of leaving her abuser. Would she be able to contact Womens Aid here?. If she is being abused her children too will be affected as well. Such men are rarely only financially abusive and is likely being abused in other ways too.

Sadly the inequality can last throughout a long marriage.

During our working life dh and I earned similar so each paid into a joint account for bills / household expenses / joint holidays. We each kept everything else which I think was roughly the same.

In retirement things have changed, one pension is much larger than the other. So all money now goes into one account, and we each get the same 'spending' money. But this came about because we have always been able to talk about money and to deal with it amicably.

However, I have a couple of friends who were in a roughly equitable position during the latter part of their working lives, but due to long periods not working when children were little, have small pensions and are significantly worse off than their dh's. One friend can barely afford a lunch out once a month while her dh has membership of an expensive golf club and spend £1000s on new kit for his various hobbies. He recently told her she needed to sell her car and take a bus to visit her elderly parents. He sees HIS pension as his reward for all the work he has done over the years

Thankfully, op, most families share fine like you do, or some variation thereof.

But, yes, unfortunately some women are abused. If you know people like this, tell them, help them and take it from there.

We don't share finances.

I earn a lot more than DH and I pay for all of our bills/essential costs as well as stuff for dd. He pays for his own needs and also sends money to his extended family overseas. He does actually have access to a joint account with "my" money in it, which he could dip into if he wanted to, but he prefers to rely on what he has earned himself.

It works for us, partly because we have very different spending habits. I do actually save quite a lot, but I'm a spender by nature and want to be free to spend what I like without someone else judging me for it! DH is naturally much more cautious and thrifty, and my spending habits would probably stress him out if they all came from the same account. On the other side of the coin, I think DH would find it hard to regularly take money out of our joint account to send to his family.

DH did put quite a lot of savings into the house when we first bought it, and years ago, he "lent" me money for a car that I never actually paid back. Likewise, there have been times when I have sent money to his family overseas when he hasn't been able to afford it. So it's pretty fluid overall and we're not at all rigid about "my money" and "his money". He's also very good at looking for cheaper deals on household bills etc, even though technically I'm the one paying for them.

I guess the bottom line is that we do both essentially subscribe to the view that what's his is mine and what's mine is his, but it's easier for us to manage things separately on a day to day basis. Either of us would readily "help" the other with money if it was needed.

DH being the much lower earner in our case wasn't ever linked to him taking on a greater share of the domestic responsibilities. We shared that stuff pretty equally overall, but if either of us did more, it was definitely me!

I agree with you OP, this is madness. My husband and I, on paper, have similar salaries at the moment. But I supported him for almost 2 years when he was unemployed and he supported me during a PhD. Now we are both employed, we made the decision that he would hugely reduce his take home pay to pump money into his pension. I work for the NHS and my pension is far more generous than his, so we wanted to try and bring his up to more closely match mine. It's pointless me having a great pension if I die before him and he has to live in poverty! I'd much rather we both have semi decent pensions than one great and one crap!

We have a child together, a mortgage, and are quietly hoping for a second (though it's looking less and less likely with passing time...). I can't imagine not being equally committed financially to the relationship! We do chose to approach the "personal spending money" slightly differently - he keeps a bit of his salary back in his account each month and I use my credit card which I pay off from the joint account.

I earn 3 times my partner's salary but take on more of the bills so we have roughly equal 'play' money each month. We've just opened a joint account to pool our play money to help us both keep track of spending as we have a good joint income but nothing at the end of the month. We both know we will spend more respectfully if it's shared.
We both also have our own savings account we bung a bit extra in for emergencies.
Works for us.

I'd be divorcing that fucker and taking half his pension and equity of the house!

Sadly, this is where we are as a society.

"Womens work" is not paid and consequently not valued. Even if you do outsource childcare/cleaning/elder care those that do it are paid minimum wage.

All these menz with their high flying careers...who is at home keeping all the plates in the air?

Ffs

It's really whatever each couple is happy to live with and no one else's business TBH to judge them

I earn a lot more than my STBEXH - I worked very very hard to get where I am. With no sacrifices or compromises on his part. He has never in 20 years maximised his earnings. We had unequal spending money. If he wanted more in my mind he could go out and earn it (he didn't)

(Unequal finances are not the reason for our split BTW)

A lot of these posts show the men as quite cruel and controlling with money. It sounds so unfair. Some couples are happy keeping things separate which is fine, but it's unfair if one side is suffering. My husband earns quite a bit more than me and we share. We have a child together and trust each other and made a life together. Any bonuses, and a small inheritance I received are shared with him. It's all our money.

We both work full time and split the childcare equally.

I agree, it's very strange. It's creates a sort of "wifely submission" to the husband despite being completely atheistic. Actually, I think it's worse than Christian wifely submission, as in Christianity the husband is supposed to be willing to give his life for his wife, take care of her, and share everything with her. Instead, there's this new, modern way of some women being unpaid caregivers (with zero financial security should the marriage break up), while their husbands use the wife's support to fly high at work and have fun hobbies, build up his own nest egg and then look down on her because she doesn't have the same.

At first I thought it replaced complementary relationships with transactional relationships. But that's not really true, because if these marriages were transactional then the woman would be able to elicit some sort of quid pro quo from the man for her work and sacrifice regarding caring for the children. Instead, she does all that work and makes those financial sacrifices with neither regard nor financial quid pro quo from the man (and again I know it's not all marriages but some of the marriages we see on here where the women are being left really skint during maternity leave and so on).

So it's more like complementary relationships have been replaced with a competitive relationship. The man and the woman are competing for access to income and for access to time to work. But because of the historical glow that marriage means "two become one" and share everything, and because we make assumptions about what marital love means, women are going into these marriages with the belief that the marriage is about being cooperative or complementary. And when the reality shows that the marriage is actually competitive, they don't understand because competition over resources is so contradictory to what "love" is.

The real problem is that children cannot thrive under a competitive model of marriage. For example, if a child has a chronic health condition that is means they need a lot of hospital appointments, or are often sick, or anything like that, then the child will really need a parent who is willing to de-emphasise paid work to care for them. But if the mother can only survive/thrive by competing with the father for access to paid work time, then this disincentivises the mother from caring for the child, or may even make it impossible for her to care for the child properly, because she literally can't afford to support herself if she takes time off work. Most women are going to put their child first, but the system a competitive model creates is that the mother and father each thrive better if they can avoid caring for the child. Since the child is, by nature, the weakest and least competitive person in the family, it's then the child who is most at risk of losing out. And if the mother ensures the child does not lose out, then the mother loses out.

Those examples you gave are financial abuse which can also happen in shared finances. It is a thing, and it's irrelevant how it's set up as long as one person has full control and final say over finances.

We have his/her money and OH earns a lot more. However he pays all the bills,mortgage etc. I keep my wage to myself and do the food shop and everything I or DD need. This allows me to save bits here and there and I have a bit of a nest egg. If I run out of money or need something expensive I can just transfer money from his account or ask/just mention it's expensive and he'll transfer me the money. At the same time if something goes really wrong boiler/washing machine/car I can use the savings to fix it.

We have eachother's backs as a household even if our finances are separate. He's also a bit daft with money and I'm a saver so it avoids those arguments as well.

Aloris everything you say is exactly what I've observed particularly this
"there's this new, modern way of some women being unpaid caregivers (with zero financial security should the marriage break up), while their husbands use the wife's support to fly high at work and have fun hobbies, build up his own nest egg and then look down on her because she doesn't have the same."

I actually spoke to my grandmother about it this afternoon to gage her thoughts and she told me that some men have always financially exploited their wives- you would usually "find those sorts spending their wages in the pub most evenings." But everyone knew they were a "selfish git" because back then what was earned was for the family.

She said it's more underhand these days because there's more money to go around and in her words "running a household isn't enough anymore, women are supposed to do that and go to work and be able to survive on the pittance she earns when kids are at school."

If my grandmother can see what's going on, why can't modern women? Modern marriage for many is a trap!

I have a few friends that don’t and I find it appalling - I had never realised sharing wasn’t the norm. It’s a terrible state of affairs.

I think you should make a point of telling people and express amazement they don’t - without sharing that you know other people who don’t - the more people think this is weird the more it will become unusual.

I do think there needs to be some kind of national education about money, with a second teaching women to stand up for themselves.

You can see how this believe then feeds into women getting terrible divorce deals.

I do think there needs to be some kind of national education PROGRAMME about money, with a SECTION teaching women to stand up for themselves.

You can see how this BELIEF then feeds into women getting terrible divorce deals.

I wouldn't I'm the main bread winner and also do most of the extra childcare. All of our finances are shared. I've told him a few times he should be a SAHP but, he thinks he's too old for this.

Even before children or marriage, we put everything into a joint account when we bought our house. We had phases of each other slightly out earning the other, it was mostly me out earning, but now he does and I think it will probably stay that way (don’t even get me started on the sexism of that - we work in the same industry in pretty similar roles, for the same company!!!!). Anyway, we think of ourselves as a unit and are both happy to share everything. When we had children we took shared parental (despite taking a financial hit as it was important for us for our children to know we were equal as parents). In my peer group, I would say that this is normal. I don’t know any sahp, both work and share the household and financial load.

We do it the same as you OP. Or at least with the same result.

DH earns more, we pay a pro rata equivalent into the joint account and crucially have the same disposable income each.

I use my disposable income very differently to him - often buying DC extras but at that point it is my choice.

By luck we have the roughly the same amount saved in our pensions but DH will soon overtake me due to whopping contributions by his employer!

We have always just had a joint account into which our salaries and child benefit gets put. I know that may not work for some but it works for us. Neither of us has expensive hobbies or tastes and we discuss big purchases. I earn less and have always spent more time parenting.