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According to CareerBuilder.com Mother’s Day survey 43% of working mothers would be willing to take a pay cut if they could spend more time with their children and 51% of working moms from two-income households would quit their job if their partner’s income was enough to support the family.
I wasn’t surprised when I read the first part. I was at an event recently where I met working mom after working mom who changed careers or modified her job to have more time for family and kids. On days when my stress level is through the roof and I can’t seem to get enough work done or spend quality time with my daughter I often start thinking whether I should be doing something to dramatically change my career path and make it less demanding and consuming. I love to work and I’ve never thought about staying at home full-time, but I do know that if I worked less, it would be easier to juggle. Read the rest of this entry »
I know this is a completely theoretical question for 99.9% of us, but I like to think about it anyway.
I spent the last 10 years of my career, before launching Work It, Mom!, doing work that was interesting, stimulating, often exciting, but work that I was not passionate about. Due to a lot of factors, not the least of which is being an immigrant to this country, I’ve always known that I needed to support myself and in addition, be able to help my parents (and my grandparents), if possible. This meant that I chose my career path with money very much in mind.
I had a completely different post planned for today, but after glancing through the Elle/MSNBC Reader Survey about money I couldn’t resist this topic. (I should also use this opportunity to brag about my awesome husband, who bought me a copy of Elle, my guilty pleasure magazine to which I’ve forgotten to renew my subscription but which does a great job of putting my stress on the back burner for a few minutes.)
Anyway, back to the money survey. There are some fun bits on there — like the fact that 1 in 3 women said that they feel less pressure to have sex with the guy if they pay for their share of the date (which implies that 2 out of 3 do?) — but what caught my eye were the stats about women who make more than their partners. Here are a few:
- 1 out of 3 breadwinners resent paying for shared expenses
- 16% of breadwinners think that men should always be primary earners
- Breadwinners are more likely than other women to think that the primary earner should have more power in the relationship
- 1 in 4 female breadwinners keep strictly separate bank accounts Read the rest of this entry »
My answer to this question would have been ‘probably yes’ before we took on our BIG life change and traded in an overpaid job for a new career as an entrepreneur.
I’ve always been pretty frugal. I grew up without money, I lived on welfare when my family immigrated to the US, and those experiences influenced me to always try to spend less, not buy things we don’t need, and to generally be conservative about money. But even with that foundation once my husband and I had a solid income we bought things we didn’t need. Nothing big or fancy, but a cute Tshirt here, a fun DVD there, an awesome new toy for our daughter — all of these add up to a bunch of stuff we don’t really need.
I am ridiculously organized — which annoys my husband to no end and to be honest, even me sometimes — so buying stuff we didn’t need didn’t result in us having too much stuff. We’d give things away, donate, throw them out. We’d rarely have piles of stuff we don’t use any more, but things were in pretty good rotation — I never bought expensive clothes for myself, but you can bet that when I saw a really cute new Tshirt, I bought it and put an older similar one in the donation pile. Read the rest of this entry »
As I’ve written about before, a bit more than six months ago our family went through a BIG life change. I quit my high-paying job in finance, we moved from our beloved-but-too-expensive-and-crazy New York City to a suburb of Boston, and I started a company (this here Work It, Mom!, of course!) As part of this transition we’ve gone from living on a fairly large income to living on mostly my husband’s income, which, while completely respectable, is a lot less than what we used to live on.
As this BIG change got closer I was completely freaked out. I was freaked out about leaving the city I came to love, moving to a new area, starting my own business, and changing our financial situation significantly. My husband and I are pretty frugal people - we saw our income increase 5x since our first jobs but we didn’t really change our life in a big way. Sure, I splurged on something for myself from to time, but I’d only buy things on sale and would agonize about spending significant sums of money just as much when I made lots of it as when I made little of it. But having the security of a steady and large paycheck is a nice luxury–your savings account grows, you don’t have to watch EVERY dollar, and the general stress level related to money is down.
So when the BIG change came, I was ready to be stressed and worried about money all the time and this impending stress made me very anxious. But as the weeks and months of our new life went on, the stress didn’t increase as much as I expected. It’s there, no doubt, but it’s not nearly as paralyzing as I anticipated.
To be honest, I am not quite sure why this is. I am an immigrant who has truly experienced what it’s like to be hungry and poor (welfare, food stamps, eating disguising canned fish — been there). My background has made me very conservative financially and I worry about our daughter’s college savings, our retirement and my parents’ retirement on a regular basis. (It’s OK to laugh at me now.) In other words, I am wired to stress about money and now that we have a lot less of it, I feel that I should be stressing more.
But I’m not. Read the rest of this entry »
If you said no, then you’re in the minority, according to a new poll. A wealth research firm (I had no idea these existed) polled more than 1,000 people nationwide and asked them this question:
How willing are you to marry an average-looking person that you liked, if they had money?
Two thirds of women and half the men said that they were extremely or very likely to do it.
Are you surprised? I have to be honest, I was. I know no poll is entirely accurate and the way the question is stated it doesn’t necessarily mean that money would be the only or even the primary reason to marry this person. (Hey, I know many marriages where two people who liked each other and were reasonably good looking decided to tie the knot, and neither had much money.) But it does suggest that many women and men feel that money is a good reason to marry someone. Read the rest of this entry »
In the US, women make less than men for doing the same job.
This is a sad fact, but it is true. We’re used to hearing that this is because women take time off to have and take care of their children they interrupt their rise to senior and higher-paying positions at work. But according to a recent study, women make 20% less than men just one year out of college (after 10 years in the workforce, they make 30% less for doing the same work.) This means that something else is contributing to the pay-gap between men and women.
Studies have shown over and over that one of these contributors is the fact that women don’t ask for raises nearly as often or as forcefully as men do. There are many books on the subject of why don’t women negotiate for raises and many career coaches focus on helping women learn how to negotiate better. But this morning I read a great post by Leslie Morgan Steiner about another reason that women might not be negotiating for raises or promotions: We pay a price for it if we do it. She talks about a recent study that showed in the workplace, men were always less willing to work with women who had attempted to negotiate vs. those who didn’t. And they didn’t care if they worked with men who negotiated.
This really resonated with me. The idea that women don’t negotiate because we’re not confident enough in our abilities has always struck me as incomplete. I am what you’d consider a fairly gutsy person in most areas of my life. I understood early on in my work life that in order to get promoted or get a raise I’d have to ask for it. And I did. But in most situations I always got the sense that asking for a raise might get me the raise but also bring with it a certain stigma: She’s too aggressive, stay away from working with her.
A few years ago I worked at a small firm where I found out that someone who was hired after me for the same level job was being paid more. (Yes, he was a guy.) I went in and asked my boss for a raise. Later that day I heard him speaking to another senior partner when he said that he was surprised at how aggressive I was asking for a raise and that he didn’t realize I was going to be that way. The other senior partner said that he wondered what else this could lead to. I got the raise, a month later, after a protracted and heated discussion. But that’s not the point. The senior men I worked for seemed to now be on guard for other stuff I might “aggressively” ask for and I knew that would have much preferred to work with someone a bit more complacent.
What about you? Do you negotiate for promotions and raises at work? Do you find that there is a stigma against women who ask for things at work?
One of our members, Lori, wrote an article this week about money and happiness. It’s a topic I’ve given some thought to and the relationship between money and happiness is certainly something that’s been discussed and researched often in the media and academia. Penelope Trunk, one of our regular contributors, wrote a great blog post about this topic, in which she cited research that suggests that above $40,000 money doesn’t do much to increase one’s happiness significantly.
I feel that I can talk about the relationship between money and happiness because I’ve both been poor and made a lot of money. When we immigrated to the US my family lived on welfare for a year. We used food-stamps to buy food, I had 3 outfits to wear to school, and when we went on a trip to Canada my parents and I shared a single room at a Motel 6. Then my dad found a job and slowly things got better financially. Did this make a difference in our happiness level? Absolutely.
When I graduated from college, I moved to New York City and got a job with a fancy consulting firm - I made more money than most people at my age but I lived in a place where many people made crazy amounts of money. Over the next 10 years I changed several jobs, each time raising my income significantly. Before I quit my finance job, my husband and I had a high income and could live comfortably pretty much anywhere else but in New York City, where costs of living were out of control. Our income was 10x what it was when we graduated from college - were we happier? Absolutely not. Yes, it was nice to have some savings and to be able to go on vacation or to the theater once in a while (we still stood in line for 4 hour to get discounted tickets). But did having more money fundamentally affect our happiness level? No.
As I’ve written about here, a few months back I quit my job to launch and run Work It, Mom! full time. I was the main breadwinner, so our income took a significant hit - to make it work, we moved out of New York to a place with a lower cost of living. We are living on a lot less than we did a few months ago. Are we less happy? No. Yes, we stress about money and life would be easier if we could get someone to clean our house every week or get a second car. But would we be happier? I don’t think so.
I am sharing my thoughts on this topic because I hope that they will inspire you to share yours. I think it’s an important conversation to have and I hope we can have it here, at Work It, Mom! Many of us are in two-income families and we work because we have to contribute income to the family. Money certainly factors in our choices of careers and other life decisions. But I’d love to hear your experiences and thoughts on whether you think money can or has increased your happiness?
Please share your thoughts in the comments!
Thanks to Jane, from the Too Cool For School blog, for highlighting one of the more ridiculous magazine articles I’ve seen lately. It’s from Money Magazine and its title is How to Marry a Billionaire.
When I first saw it, I thought it would be a joke of some kind. But I kept reading, and there was no joke - just “useful” tips on how to find, attract, and marry the super-rich. Here are some highlights:
“Get an M.B.A. ASAP. To worm your way into a billionaire’s business, and eventually his heart, you need the right career. An M.B.A. will give you the most flexibility. Since people think that it qualifies you to do just about anything, you can get hired just about anywhere.
Focus on industries with the most billionaires: finance (52), investments (51), service (42), media and entertainment (38), real estate (33) and oil and gas (30).”
(And here I thought an MBA was supposed to be a stepping stone to a successful business career!)
“If you can’t tell the difference between Jasper Johns and Johns Hopkins, study up so you can converse. It doesn’t matter what you say specifically as long as you sound knowledgeable. Even though he collected Impressionist works, hedge fund biggie Ken Griffin ($1.7 billion) didn’t get mad when his date, Anne Dias, dismissed the movement as something she’d outgrown. Instead, he married her.”
“Be into what he’s into. Once you zero in on a prospect, you’ll have to look as if you’re interested in what he or she likes. So spend some time boning up on thoroughbred horses, JAR jewelry, Modigliani and your billionaire’s business.”
If this isn’t sickening enough, As Jane points out in her blog post:
“Although the article purports to be gender neutral, it counsels male readers to target widows because ‘..for all of the strides women have made in the workplace, most superrich gals do acquire their wealth through their relationships with men.”
Well said.
But what makes me cringe when reading this article is the thought of my daughter reading something like this. Now, she is 3 and can’t read. But what about when she is 20? Is this the type of advice I want her to read about in a reputable financial publication?
I might be overthinking this, but it got to me. Check it out and share your thoughts and reactions!