Pay Dirt is Slate’s money advice column. Have a question? Send it to Lillian, Athena, and Elizabeth here. (It’s anonymous!)
Dear Pay Dirt,
My husband makes two times if not three times more than me. We have combined bank accounts and credit cards. We don’t “split” anything we just pay out of our joined accounts. However, he went to law school and has a bunch more debt and he has bad credit. I take care of a lot of household chores but he consistently maintains that he “works” more than me. His time is worth more than mine since he is literally paid more, so it’s fair, in his mind, that I have more household chores. We don’t have kids but have four pets. He takes care of our dog mostly, but I take care of the cats and 90 percent of other “boring” household things. I feel slighted. I have a very challenging job at a major tech company and work really hard. He just “downshifted” to in-house work. Despite the fact I know he works hard it still feels unfair. How do I tackle this? He’s a lawyer so I need my argument to be 100 percent.
—Disgruntled Cat Mom
Dear Disgruntled Cat Mom,
Unfortunately, your situation is not uncommon. Women in heterosexual, cohabitating relationships do, on average, more than double the housework than their partners, even when they work equal hours in paid work. (Women in same-sex relationships divide unpaid household labor more equally.) Women with children have an even more significant gap. Gendered social norms mean that women across countries, socio-economic classes, and cultures do more unpaid domestic work on top of their paid work, leading to a “double burden.”
When you work outside the home, the market and your employer determine the value of your time. When doing unpaid work, the value of your work is determined by how you value your leisure time (described as the leisure-labor curve in economics) or how much it would cost to have another person do that work. The amount you make for your day job isn’t relevant here—it’s the value of how else you would spend your time. Presumably, cleaning the house and feeding your menagerie doesn’t mean you get to work fewer hours at your demanding nine-to-five. Instead, it offsets time you would be relaxing, sleeping, or doing hobbies. He argues that he makes more at paid work than you, so his time is more valuable. But your leisure time is equal to his because market forces do not determine its value. If he valued your happiness and free time as highly as he does his own, he would share the housework more fairly. He also might be hurting the household’s overall earning capacity, as women with an unequal burden of domestic tasks often earn less and are less productive at work than their peers with more equal distribution.
If he’s so concerned with the market value of labor, find out what it would cost to outsource the work and invoice him an hourly rate for the costs of the extra work you do for the household. Either your husband pays you the prevailing fair market wage for your extra housework, does those tasks himself, or pays someone else to do them.
In the end, this is not only about logical arguments. It is about his respect for you. If he wants to show up as a complete and equal partner who respects his wife’s time and mental health, he’ll figure out a way to lighten your load. He lives in the house, cuddles the cats, and eats the food. If you were sick—would he start picking up the slack? Or would he continue to argue, on principle, that he earns more, so it’s worth living with messy litter boxes, bare cupboards, and piles of laundry? Or what if you started out-earning him or had children? If he can’t prioritize household needs because of his salary, is he a good life partner or just a smug business partner who lives with you?
Dear Pay Dirt,
I am a woman in her mid-20s. Due to personal and family issues, I ended up graduating late and have only worked my “adult” job full-time for two years now. I have no real passion for the job, and while it pays decent money, I experience some anxiety about the future and want to earn more to feel more secure. I graduated college with a degree in English, so while my soft skills are good, I think the only way I can make enough money to feel safe is to switch to tech, most likely through certification in coding/software engineering.
My problem is that my real passion isn’t in coding, but writing. I have always wanted to be a novelist. On average, I spent an additional 20 hours a week writing in my free time. A part of me wants to stay at my current undemanding job so that I will have enough time to write to my heart’s content with the desperate hope that I will beat the odds and eventually make good money through writing alone. The reasonable part of me knows that making good money off of writing is extremely rare and often unstable and that I need to prepare for the future. Every time I am about to take the plunge into starting a certification program, I become scared that I will not only resent coding the way I do my current career, but that learning coding and starting a career in it will cause me to put my passion on hold for years, making me even more unhappy. I also am free to live at home for as long as I want to, but I do want to move out soon, which is difficult when living in a high-cost-of-living area. Right now, it seems like my two options are to throw myself completely into writing and hope for the best or put my writing on hold to build a new career. Any advice on what to do?
—Don’t Want to Be a Starving Artist
Dear Starving Artist,
Your choices are not black and white. You don’t have to either throw yourself into writing your novel or give up writing to retrain for a job in which you have no interest other than the paycheck. No genie has approached you with a binary choice: “write and starve” versus “work in tech and be miserable.” Let go of the all-or-nothing thinking, and this situation will get easier. While it’s important to be realistic about your odds of making a full-time living as a novelist, a higher-paying job doesn’t mean you have to stop writing.
Many successful writers worked unrelated jobs while they built their writing careers. Roxanne Gay, who had day jobs all through her 20s and 30s while she was prestigiously published, even teaches a writing MasterClass with a section on having a day job as an artist. Rather than thinking of having a “boring” day job as a failure as a writer, reframe your employer as an investor in your writing career. Look for a job that helps you toward your writing goals—it could be in tech, but plenty of other industries pay a good wage and might be a better fit for your education.
If you keep putting off doing a certification program because you dread coding, you’re likely right that you wouldn’t be happy doing the job every day. So avoid getting stuck on tech as your only other job option. Junior developers, especially those not enthusiastic about coding, face a tough job market at the moment. Your soft skills and English degree could set you up nicely for a job as a technical writer (check out Write the Docs) or project manager. Yes, you won’t be writing your Great American Novel all day, but you will get to build on skills you already have rather than starting over in a totally new career. While you search for a new job, consider freelance writing to add some extra income.
Don’t look at salary alone; evaluate fringe perks that allow you to invest in your writing. It could be that the job has downtime when you can work on personal projects or has a swing shift so you can use your mornings to write. Maybe you find a gig in academia, allowing you access to free writing workshops or a library after work hours. Or perhaps you find a job that provides health insurance to part-time employees, allowing you to ramp down as your writing income picks up. You may look for a job that gives you insight into the publishing process (as Jane Villaneuva did while she wrote her novel.)
In parting, I want to give you two book recommendations: Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert, a guidebook for making time for your artistic passions, and I Know How She Does It by Laura Vanderkam, which contains the time diaries of women who juggle high-paying jobs, families, and side projects (like a published mystery book series). Balancing a day job and writing isn’t an impossible task—it’s the norm for most writers. You’re going to be OK.
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Dear Pay Dirt,
I am moving across the country for work and am wondering if I should sell my house or rent it out. I bought it three years ago and gave a balance of $200,000 remaining with an interest rate of 2.6 percent. I don’t think I would ever move back to this town (rural Alaska) but it is hard to walk away from that mortgage. My new position will pay me enough to be able to afford to rent in a new city but I need help figuring out what would be the best course of action. My family isn’t good with money so I don’t want to ask them. I might be willing to move back to this town if my boyfriend made the move with me but the chances of that happening are pretty small.
—One Foot Out the Door
Dear One Foot Out the Door,
Keeping a home you never intend to return to, in a remote location, to become a landlord from across the country—all to keep a low mortgage rate? It doesn’t make sense. Sell the house, take advantage of the capital gains exclusion, and use the proceeds to set yourself up in your new city or pad out your investments. Don’t make your life unnecessarily complicated by keeping real estate where you don’t want to live.
Dear Pay Dirt,
My wife (48) and I (61) have almost no debt beyond her $40,000 in student loans. But despite living in a rent-controlled apartment, without a lot of expenses, we are not saving a lot of money. She is self-employed without a retirement plan, while I work and have about $120,000 in various retirement accounts. We have a chunk of money, about $150,000 sitting in a savings account that yields almost no interest. I am terrified we are not setting ourselves up for retirement anytime soon and feel like there is something we could be doing with that cash to make things better for us in the future. My wife wants us to consider paying off her student loans in total.
—Afraid for the Future
Dear Afraid for the Future,
There is no reason to have $150,000 in an account earning no interest if you’re paying interest on student loans. You’re dealing with a double whammy: losing value to inflation and paying compounding interest on student loans. Pay off those loans as soon as you can (maybe wait until the Supreme Court’s verdict on Biden’s student loan forgiveness, if her loans are eligible). Not paying them off because you’re saving for retirement is a false choice: Paying them off won’t make you any less prepared for retirement.
Once you’ve paid them off, your wife can redirect the money she was putting into loan payments into turbo-charging her retirement savings. The advantage of being self-employed is that there are ways to save even more for retirement while reducing your taxes (which are higher when you’re self-employed). A Simplified Employee Pension Plan (SEP) or individual 401(k) will allow her to tax-defer up to $66,000 of her self-employment income. And while those contributions are limited by her net business income, IRA contributions are not. If you want to shore up your retirement savings, start redirecting some of your massive cash pile into IRAs—you can contribute $7,500 this year, and your wife can contribute $6,500 (as long as you’re within the household income limits). Make sure your IRAs are invested in the market, not just sitting in cash. If you’re struggling to figure out how much you need to save for retirement, it’s a good time to talk with a financial planner to get a better idea of what you need to do over the next several years to prepare.
—Lillian
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