Quote:
Originally Posted by GGG
If you look at household labour for a week I’d say there is a good 20 hrs a week of labour required in cooking, cleaning, home maintenance, dealing with schools, driving kids to activities.
So if you can afford it why would you add another 40 hours to total household labour.
If you look a a working parent they may farm out cooking, cleaning, childcare, home maintenance and other tasks to third parties in order to allow them to work in a job that requires 40hrs of labour. So when Sliver says there are two income households that do 40-55hrs a week of work plus manage a household I think you need to take a close look at the number of hours you outsource. I would bet Sliver is hiring a cleaner.
I think a better question is why does anyone work outside the home? You give up 1/2 of your waking hours, incur stress, and get some satisfaction from accomplishments. So asking oneself if there was no financial incentive to work what would you do with your time. If the answer isn’t work your current job then the concept of “homemaker” as a profession shouldn’t be confusing.
A homemaker is essentially a person who has reduced their labour requirement to survive and can spend time on the things they want. Volunteering, small personal projects, crazy ideas etc.
As a goal reducing the required labour to sustain a household is essentially the entire concept of retirement. Some people have achieved 50% of it first.
On the financial side I’m always surprised when married couples have separate enough accounts that gift giving is actually a gift. Whether dual or single income you have a total household income from which you agree to spend. If one spouse has dramatically more spending power due to disproportionate incomes and it’s viewed as individual money that seems to be a point of potential conflict regardless of if you have a two income or one income family. Obviously each couple has there own system that works for them. We just run joint spending for household and each get an allowance for personal spending.
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Yes, we do have a cleaner. It's the best $350 I spend a month. Certainly not an expense that is worth my wife foregoing her own career to avoid.
Personally, I don't like work. I think the work week should be four days (maximum!). I moved my company to 4.5 days per week last year and we're sticking with it. I have given people the option to work 40 hours (9, 9, 9, 9, 4) or 36 hours (8, 8, 8, 8, 4). It's about a 50/50 split of 40-hours-per-week employees and 36-hours-per-week employees. The less people have to work the better. We are all happier with our Friday afternoons off.
I don't like seeing people being taken advantage of. If one person is working 0 hours per week (or even call it 20 like in your post; however, I would contend the spouse working out of the home 40 hours per week is likely doing a not-insignificant amount of that 20 hours of house work) and one person is working 40 hours per week, you have a host and a parasite. Somebody is leaching off somebody else's labour. How often have you seen the stay-at-home person outlive the breadwinner? Every time? The person who lived the feet-up life-of-Riley lifestyle for 80 years with very little stress lived their easy life at the
expense of the poor person who had to toil through a career to support them. Had both worked, both people could have shared in the responsibility to labour to support their own lives.