The Two-Income Trap - Elizabeth Warren [56]
And those costs add up. There are the lawyers, one for him and one for her. Court costs. Document preparation fees. Charges for photocopying the legal and financial records. The costs are substantial if the parties can agree on everything; if they fight, the lawyers just get richer. And legal fees are only the beginning. Someone has to move out, and that means cash for first and last month’s rent, phone installation charges, a separate checking account. Some furniture? Dishes? A shower curtain? Then there are the unexpected costs, which tend to creep higher when there are no longer two adults to divide the chores and help each other with life’s little emergencies. Will he send out his laundry and eat out more often? Will she hire someone to change the oil in the car and clean out the gutters? Without Dad to share the burden, will she miss work more often when the kids get sick? Will he give up overtime on Saturdays because that is his only day with the kids? With the savings account drained by the legal bills and the costs piling up, the credit card may be the only way to fill in the gaps.
After divorce, they still have to meet their regular financial commitments—those that are the hardest kind to cut back. The biggest item in the family budget is the home, which would make it the most logical place to try to downsize. But mothers like Gayle Pritchard are guided by more than a steely eye on the balance sheet. They strongly resist pulling their children out of familiar schools and neighborhoods at the same moment that their family life is disintegrating. Moreover, many women fear that without their husband’s income, they will never get approval to buy another home, even one with a smaller price tag. They are haunted by the nameless dread that if they relinquish that precious bit of real estate, they will be letting go of the middle-class aspirations they hold for their children.
Where else can they cut? Should they sell Mom’s car—the one she drives to work every day? Should they pull Junior out of day care or tell their son to quit college? Should they drop the health insurance policy? This isn’t a matter of living more frugally. These are the costs that families incur to keep their children safe and hold them securely in the middle class, even when there is no longer a father in the home. To give these up is to admit more than financial failure; it means failing as parents.
So where does that leave the newly single mother? She is living the feminist dream, better educated and earning far more than her sisters of a generation ago. And yet, in the wake of divorce, she will learn just how far she can fall. In chapter 2 we showed that Tom and Susan, the typical one-earner family in the 1970s, had 46 percent of Tom’s income left over once the housing, health insurance, and other fixed expenses had been paid. If Tom and Susan split up, Susan’s discretionary income, once she collected child support payments and found a new job, would fall to just 19 percent of the family’s predivorce income.27 That is a staggering drop, making it tough for the newly formed fatherless household to survive a generation ago. But things are worse for today’s working mothers. Today, the two-earner married family starts out just slightly better off than the divorced woman of a generation ago, with only 25 percent of income available for food, utilities, clothing, and all other discretionary purchases. But if today’s two-parent family is squeezed, the postdivorce mother is crushed. If Justin and Kimberly (the typical two-earner family in the 2000s) divorce, Kimberly’s discretionary income would drop to a mere 4 percent of the family’s predivorce income, even after she collects child support.28 (See Figure 5.2.) The middle-class life she and her husband once provided for their children