Improve being you got more wealth.
If yes, roughly, by how much?
Cross posting from hexbear https://www.hexbear.net/post/163818
For me, yes!
We are both currently PhD students, so our salary is not so high (about 30K/year each after taxes). With our combined salaries and our not-so-extravagant lifestyles we can save comfortably while still being able to spend in our hobbies. We are also very privileged in having two families that would be able to help us in an emergency if something goes very wrong, and we have a good health insurance and no debt.
We end up paying a bit less each by renting a single much larger apartment rather than two smaller “student” apartments. So it ends up being a lower total cost for a much more comfortable living place.
Since it is now two of us that cook, we cook a lot more often rather than buying meals, which ends up saving us a lot of money. If I buy food at work it is about $10 for one meal, and we can easily make 4 meals for $10.
We found a place that is 20 min away from each of our institutes by bike, so we don’t have a car and rarely use public transport.
Our gym lets us share a single membership if we live together, so that is about a $350/year saving.
We have also learned some money-saving habits from each other, so we try to combine the best habits of each one of us.
At the moment I can save about 30% of my salary most months. If we move into higher-paying jobs afterwards, we don’t have any reason to increase our spending until we have kids so we will be able to save more. We also want to move away from this beautiful but very expensive city, so living will become a lot cheaper.
Sure, but how much more are you still paying compared to living in a larger shared student flat or dormitory? At least back when I was still a student that was quite common and very few people could/wanted to afford those indeed comparatively very expensive single flats.
We are paying about €750 each of rent and utilities for an 80 m2 space, which is a very good deal for the city we live in. It would be possible to find a small room in a shared space for maybe €500. Finding a place to rent here is quite a struggle though, and most international students don’t manage to find a good deal.
Absolutely not.
As a single guy, you can cut a lot of corners and find your life acceptable. I was making one of the higher wages in the city I was living in (it was a small city in the middle of nowhere so that doesn’t mean much) and happily renting a room in an old lady’s basement and that was fine by me. I didn’t need anything fancy to eat, and I could happily just chill out on my computer for a few days if I didn’t want to spend any money. Moreover, you can set a budget and stick to the budget and the only person you need to keep disciplined is yourself.
Once you get a woman into the mix, you can’t cut those corners anymore. You’re going to rent a whole space (we moved into a house). You’re going to be getting real groceries. You’re going to be funding real stuff to do. If she wants to spend a bit more money, she’s going to spend a bit more money.
She filled a hole in my heart and I’m so glad we found each other, it’s made my life better and after 10 years of marriage we just had our first son which filled another hole in my heart I never knew was there, but under no circumstances whatsoever can I say it made my financial situation better.
I think this is an important insight, even though it is a bit unfair to put the blame on the woman like that. The problem is rather the concept of the nuclear family and the expectations it puts both on the women and the man and all the assumed to be necessary lifestyle that comes with it. Saint Andrewism made a video about more or less this recently.
So yes, due to sharing expenses and some tax incentives for nuclear families it does in theory appear to be cheaper to live together like that, but in reality people have plenty of other forms of living, often cheaper and more fulfilling (or not).
However women do seem to be still more invested in the model of the nuclear family as it is sold to them as the model that gives them the most autonomy as a stay at home mom. This is a myth, but one hard to break, and for someone quite opposed to the concept this makes it very hard to engage in romantic relationships.
Honestly, I’d argue the opposite. My wife is a stay at home wife and a stay at home mom because it is her will to do so, but she exercises her will in defiance of overwhelming societal pressure to go out and get a career even though that isn’t what she wants to do with her life. If she’s talking to people she’s never going to meet again, she just lies or changes the subject when it comes up because it’s so uncomfortable hearing the judgmental “oh… you don’t work.”
Unfortunately, postmodern culture mistakes freedom to choose to do a thing with an obligation to do a thing, and the freedom not to do a thing with an obligation not to do a thing. The point of freedom should be that we each have the autonomy to follow our own chosen path willfully, rather than an obligation to follow whatever path has been prescribed for us. To switch one prescribed path for another isn’t freedom, it’s leading you out of one cage and into another.
I don’t think what I wrote and what your wrote is the opposite at all, in fact your first paragraph confirms exactly what I wrote in my last, no?
Given that you’re suggesting that society pushes for my wife’s choice, I don’t think so. If she felt pressure to be a stay at home mom we’d be saying the same thing, but instead she feels pressure to work.
You misunderstood ;) I said that the traditional idea of the stay at home mom in a nuclear family is being sold by society as giving more freedom to women (compared to for example a multi-generational family) and apparently this myth worked very well on your wife.
Ah, you’re dead wrong then. I guess it’s my fault for not elaborating, but that’s fine.
How so? You seem to continue trying to mix it up with (feminist) economic freedom ideas, which I never even mentioned nor implied.
My wife and I lived the double-income, no kids lifestyle for about 8 years. She had a solid union job and I was doing ok in IT, we definitely had a good time, lots of travel, fancy dinners, live music and theater. When we had kids, it all went to hell, financially. She left her job, we have a ton of added expenses, etc etc. She’s probably going back to work this year but the kids make it impossible to travel like we used to, and their interests don’t mesh much with ours, so we don’t get to do as many of the kinds of things we like.
I went from having a roommate to cohabiting to being married. Through it all, my rent has stayed similar. Overall I think it has helped because we’re sharing more assets.
maybe if both of us could have a job, but no
