The Two-Income Trap - Elizabeth Warren [34]
A mother who has gone into the workplace brings home a paycheck, but she forfeits the economic value of her backup role. So long as nothing goes wrong, the tradeoff is a simple choice between two viable alternatives. Some families prefer to have Mom at home and are willing to live with less money; others accommodate a working mother and enjoy a richer lifestyle. When trouble strikes, however, the family learns that the two choices may not have been as equivalent as they had seemed. Only one leaves the family with a safety net.
No New Money
Not long after Gabe was born, Carmen was back in the hospital, this time for an infection. She was run down, worried about how her family would care for Gabe, and frantic over the family’s bills. “My fever was spiking and all I was thinking about was what bills I had to pay. I managed to get them to let me out of the hospital.”
Eight months after Gabe was born, the Ramirez family was behind on the utilities bills. “I got one of those pink notices to disconnect [the power]. I was so scared—I need that electricity to pump the air into my kid’s lungs.” In the early spring of 2001, a creditor showed up at the police station where Mike is assigned, threatening to repossess the family minivan. The room fell quiet as the other police officers determinedly looked away, trying to give Mike some privacy as he pleaded with the man to give him a little more time to pay. The next day, Mike and Carmen went to see a lawyer. After twenty minutes with the paralegal, they signed the papers to file for bankruptcy.
Not every two-income family will face the financial crisis that hit Mike and Carmen. Whether they do depends in large part on how they spend the second salary. The single-breadwinner family, by definition, plans its financial commitments geared to a single income. A stay-at-home mother is a contingent worker, called on only in an emergency; in ordinary times, the family lives on one paycheck. In theory, the two-income family could take the same approach. They could spend one paycheck and keep the second one in reserve. If disaster strikes, they will have ample savings to cushion any blow.
The two-income family has another budgeting alternative. They can do exactly what the over-consumption camp claims they do—blow that second paycheck on expensive vacations, gadgets for the house, brand-name clothes, and dozens of other things they “don’t really need.” While this strategy might make the finger-waggers sputter with indignation, these families would actually be just as prepared for an emergency as their one-income counterparts. If something goes wrong, they can simply stop purchasing the extras without any serious harm to the family’s standard of living, while Mom returns to her role as backup earner or caregiver. If Dad loses his job, Mom’s income will be reallocated to cover the family’s living expenses while her husband looks for a job.
Over the past 25 years, mothers poured into the workplace, but they did not fritter away their paychecks on buying sprees that could be abandoned at the first sign of trouble. Nor did they lock that money in the bank. Millions of two-income families used that second income to purchase opportunities for their children—a home in a safe neighborhood with good schools, a comprehensive health insurance policy, two reliable cars, preschool, and college tuition. They made long-term commitments to ongoing expenses—and they counted on both incomes to make ends meet.
Justin and Kimberly, the modern two-earner family we introduced in chapter 2, illustrate the point. If Justin lost his $39,000-a-year job, Kimberly would still be working. She would be earning $28,800 on average, which is considerably more than her counterpart Susan would have earned a generation