The Two-Income Trap - Elizabeth Warren [3]
This book is dedicated to improving the lives of the hard-working, play-by-the-rules families who are learning the hard way that the rules have changed. These pages speak to the hopes and fears of today’s middle class. It is our deepest desire that we can help Americans understand how the financial rules have changed, and how they must now play smarter than ever. We hope that we can help more families make changes—the kind that can protect them from disaster and help them build a brighter future.
The past several months have strengthened our faith in America’s great middle class. They are under assault, but they are fighters. They want to know the truth about what is going on, and they are willing to work hard to protect themselves. The Two-Income Trap tells a harrowing tale, but it also speaks of survival and triumph. America’s middle class is ready to fight back.
APRIL 2004
1
Just the Way She Planned
Ruth Ann smiles when she talks about the summer she was pregnant with Ellie.1 Those were the good days, when life was working out just the way she had planned.
Dexter was five and learning to swim. Ruth Ann would pick him up from day care in the late afternoon, and the two of them would head for the town swimming pool. While Dexter thrashed about in the water, Ruth Ann would dangle her feet in the pool, waiting for her husband, James, to swing by on his way home from work. Dinners were late and haphazard, but no one cared. Ruth Ann’s life was exactly as she had wanted it, exactly as she had planned.
And Ruth Ann was a planner. In college, she had majored in accounting. It was respectable and dependable, a little bit the way Ruth Ann saw herself. After graduation, she resisted the lure of Houston or Dallas and moved back to her hometown, Wylie, Texas, where she could live near her parents, get some experience doing payrolls and tax returns, and build up a little savings while waiting to begin what she always thought of as her “real life.”
Real life began when she saw James Wilson, a friend from her high school days, who was managing a carpet and flooring store in Wylie. It was his hands, she would later say, his capable hands, the sure hands of a carpenter, that drew her to him. But it was something else as well. During her junior year at Texas Tech, Ruth Ann had broken off an engagement because she couldn’t shake the feeling that her intended was not the kind of guy she could count on. With James she felt she was marrying someone who would work as hard as she did to build a life together.
After a brief courtship, they married. A year later, in January 1994, Dexter was born. Ruth Ann was back at work in six weeks.
Three years later, Ruth Ann and James took a deep collective breath and jumped. They bought their first home. It wasn’t the house of their dreams, but it was the house they thought they could afford. The roof needed to be replaced and the kitchen hadn’t been updated in fifty years, but the house had three nice-sized bedrooms, a big yard, and, most important, at $84,000 it was within the couple’s price range. Ruth Ann recalls the day they moved, a happy confusion of uncles and cousins carrying furniture, while Ruth Ann’s Aunt Ida set up a big picnic in the front yard of the new home to feed both the movers and the neighbors. That night, Ruth Ann sank down in the big old tub in the upstairs bathroom and let the joy run through her.
Two years later, in September 1999, there was another cause for celebration: Ruth Ann gave birth to a little girl, Ellie. Nine weeks later, Ruth Ann returned to work and life settled down again.
Then it happened. Just after the 1999 Christmas season, when Dexter was six and Ellie was five months old, James’s boss announced that he was closing the store. A national megastore had opened a few miles away, and its huge floor-covering department was sucking away business. To save on costs, layoffs were effective immediately. James was out of work in one day.
James was frantic about finding another job. Like Ruth Ann, he didn’t want