Honestly, after you get a certain age, a lot of American women expect you not to need them to work.
So I was downstairs at my hangout spot at the bar where I’m good friends with the bartender. A group of us started talking and this 45 year old lady who was attractive, a lawyer, multiple paid off properties, with two small kids going through a divorce and she was saying if she gets serious about someone, it would have to be someone who could pay all of the bills so if she didn’t want to work, she didn’t have to.
But if she did work, her money was her money. She would use it to buy for her kids, help her family (aging parents mostly). Her husband shouldn’t expect “her” money to be used for household expenses. Funny enough, I have a cousin who is in her early 50s also a lawyer with her own practice, divorced with two grown children and a 14 year old who feels the same way.
She wants to be able to stop working. You would be surprised at the number of self sufficient American women who really don’t want to work.
For me personally, I’ve been married since I was 38 and my wife was 36 and we agreed for her to stop working when I was 46 and she was 44.
First I didn’t want her working during Covid in 2020 and then after Covid we started traveling a lot including a year of doing the “digital nomad” thing flying one way across the country. I had just gotten a job that was paying 7x more than she was making.
She has her hobby/passion projects that bring in a little money. But that’s about it.
As far as I know, you're also not spending $3m+ on a home. Even at $700k/yr income, I still need another income to afford a decent bay area home unless I want to live on the absolute razors edge. It also means that if I lose my work, we're completely fucked and I better find another job very fast. That $20k/month you gotta pay for the home ain't gonna disappear on its own.
I too could live in a world of not needing a wife with any income if I chose to live in BFE or moved to Thailand. However, I want to raise my kids in a decent community with ample opportunities and be in a region where I have a good amount of career options rather than being tied into the singular (low-pay) employer that exists within the region or be stuck in remote-hell.
Then don’t live in the Bay Area? I make less than a 3rd of that and live in a nice condo with multiple bars in walking distance - including one downstairs, restaurant downstairs, multiple pools, two gyms. Max out my 401K and HSA and we have over a dozen trips planned this year including a few to see family. But most just to check things off of our bucket list. We are flying out to Las Vegas next week just for concert.
I didn’t make over 200K until 2021 at 47 and I have had two nice houses built over the years, we just bought our condo three years ago.
There is an entire United States outside of the Bay Area and there is a such thing as remote work.
The median home price in the US is $410K.
I had my second home built in north metro Atlanta in the “good school system” in 2016 - 5 bed/3.5 bath/3100 square feet for $335K and sold it last year for $670K.
Funny enough, in 2020, an Amazon Recruiter reached out to me about as an SDE job that would have required me to relocate after COVID. Even with the $100k more than I was making I could have negotiated, I couldn’t have reproduced my lifestyle in Seattle.
I did keep talking to the recruiter and they suggested I apply for a “permanently remote”[1]/“field by design” role at AWS Professional Services based on my background. It only paid $55K more. But allowed me to work remotely and a year later, we moved to state tax free Florida saving more money.
[1] As of this year, even the “field by design” roles have an RTO mandate when they aren’t on a customer’s site. Luckily I left in late 2023.
> I also means that if I lose my work, we're completely fucked and I better find another job very fast. That $20k/month you gotta pay for the home ain't gonna disappear on its own.
You’re really thinking that statistically the chance of you finding a spouse who has an income that can support your budget if you are out of a job is likely?
Guess how little I stressed when I got Amazoned in 2023? I didn’t need to chase BigTech compensation to be comfortable.
My Plan B was a regular old Enterprise CRUD job. I’m now making around what I did at AWS working (remotely) at a third party consulting company. There are some remote jobs out there. At some point, I’ll probably try my lot as a “fractional CTO”.
BTW, when I was living in Atlanta in 2020 with the big house in the burbs in the good school system, our total budget including our mortgage was around $8000. I only put 3.5% down to have it built.
> I too could live in a world of not needing a wife with any income if I chose to live in BFE or moved to Thailand
You don’t need to move to Thailand - just out of the Bay Area.
Again, your lifestyle might work for you but it doesn't work for everyone. What you want is to travel a lot and nowhere do you mention anything about kids. If you're wanting to make sure your kids have every option available, they need to have the option of feeder schools like Harker. If you're serious about providing options to your kids, you're gonna have a hard time getting away from these very expensive regions and therefore needing a high income that most remote options won't provide.
If I didn't give a shit about the future of my kids, I could live in BFE or travel a lot too.
How’s your lifestyle working out for you right now? Are you happy?
Don’t you think it is strange that you make $700K a year and can’t find the same sort of contentment that many have making literally 20% of what you make?
Guess how many kids lead fulfilling lives without getting into prestigious “feeder schools”.
Do you really want your kids to also be chasing money and status like you seem to be doing at the expense of their happiness?
Your fallacy is thinking that all of these kids are miserable. I know a lot of these children and they're very happy. They work reasonably hard in school but then after they get out of school - everything is so incredibly easy. They went to the right schools from an early age which allowed them to get into target colleges which lead to target jobs and good marriages from college or from being in the right social circle (which target school+job allows).
It's mostly people like me who have grinded to high incomes that are the miserable ones. We have had to struggle at each step and had no one to help us at any point in our journey. I struggle to meet anyone with my background in any of the social circles I'm in. (In fact, I never have)
They're welcome to go down different paths. It's about giving them the options from an early age. I never had the option to go to an Ivy League (which would've made my life such a joke in comparison) because I was born into an incredibly poor and unknown area.
> Are you happy?
Don’t you think it is strange that you make $700K a year and can’t find the same sort of contentment that many have making literally 20% of what you make?
You are worried about your potential children being “happy” when you can’t find anyone to procreate with to create children. “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results.”
You’ve worked hard, make good money and still seem to be miserable. Just maybe the answer isn’t money?
I am French, not American so I may not get all the subtleties, but for me this woman is simply an egoist or is looking for financial support in exchange for something.
Pay for me with your money, but what is mine is mine.
So I was downstairs at my hangout spot at the bar where I’m good friends with the bartender. A group of us started talking and this 45 year old lady who was attractive, a lawyer, multiple paid off properties, with two small kids going through a divorce and she was saying if she gets serious about someone, it would have to be someone who could pay all of the bills so if she didn’t want to work, she didn’t have to.
But if she did work, her money was her money. She would use it to buy for her kids, help her family (aging parents mostly). Her husband shouldn’t expect “her” money to be used for household expenses. Funny enough, I have a cousin who is in her early 50s also a lawyer with her own practice, divorced with two grown children and a 14 year old who feels the same way.
She wants to be able to stop working. You would be surprised at the number of self sufficient American women who really don’t want to work.
For me personally, I’ve been married since I was 38 and my wife was 36 and we agreed for her to stop working when I was 46 and she was 44.
First I didn’t want her working during Covid in 2020 and then after Covid we started traveling a lot including a year of doing the “digital nomad” thing flying one way across the country. I had just gotten a job that was paying 7x more than she was making.
She has her hobby/passion projects that bring in a little money. But that’s about it.