Please tell me this is a new blogs.about.com feature.
Published by Kyso Kisaen January 14th, 2007 in Advice, HUH!?, Soapbox, WankersAbout.com has never been my go-to source for anything, but only because it’s kind of bland and usually not terribly helpful. The flipside of that, though, is that it’s never struck me as too terribly hurtful, either. And if it wasn’t chockfull o’ detail, at least the authors managed to convey the idea that they weren’t completely talking out of their ass, and that maybe they looked a fact or two up before they started typing.
Until today. Perhaps someone should let them know there’s a glitch in their matrix:
The Argument Against Two Income Families
From Pat Veretto,
Your Guide to Frugal Living.
FREE Newsletter. Sign Up Now!It doesn’t always make frugal (or common) sense for both spouses to work
This being about.com, I expect Pat to tell us in what situations having two incomes might not make sense, and maybe provide a list of things to consider when trying to determine if you should go from a duo to a single-breadwinning household. Perhaps a few external links?
Or she could just open up a can of snit all over teh interwebs. Her choice.
Two incomes often mean empty houses much of the day, even while those houses are bigger and fancier than they were a half century ago. Empty houses are targets for burgleries, which raises insurance costs as well. Two incomes mean two cars, double the auto insurance, gas and maintenance - and a two car garage to hold them. It means take out dinners, convenience food and fast food more often. If there are children, it means day care expenses. It means paying more for taxes, more for parking and more for clothing than if one parent were to stay at home. Working costs money.
Working can also put a household in a precarious position. Two incomes means that the household budget is geared to XX amount of dollars, split between the two wage earners. If one wage earner is laid off, or cannot work for other reasons, it can mean bankruptcy for the family because the bills are so large and the lifestyle is dependent on both incomes….
I’m not against two income families, if it’s truly needed to keep a family afloat - not awash in goods, but afloat in the economy. We need to be able to see the risks and dangers involved, though, and to make that choice with our eyes wide open, not just because that’s the thing to do or because we want a “more affluent” lifestyle. (Read: we want a newer car, a bigger house, and we want to hire someone else to take care of them.)
Wow, Pat, you sure do have me pegged! Except for the part where you leave me feeling like I’ve just been lectured by a bitter, spiteful ass. People don’t need two-bit about.com contributors making snitty class-based assumptions about their lifestyles before providing absolutely no useful advice. That’s what blogs and forums are for.
The stay at home parent can garden and put up food to cut food costs year ’round. He/she can do maintenance and other chores that would otherwise have to be paid for.
Because everyone googling “frugal living” has a yard that they can garden in and the tools necessary for home maintenence. Also, none of them rent so of course they’d be concerned about (and responsible for) home repair. And gardening is free; please don’t provide any information about weighing the cost of growing tomatoes vs purchasing a can of tomatoes.
That means it’s harder to find a job when you’re just starting out. That, in turn, means that more young people are more dependent on parents to help or support them financially because they can’t find a job, which means that Mom and Dad feel the need to work to make enough to be able to support their young adult children.
Women, you’re stealing the jobs from your very own sons! Please, be reasonable! I can back this claim up, I just choose not to. Anyway, there is no reason to believe that Pat is a woman who was forced to learn to live frugally when she was left a single parent in the ’80s and is now maybe a bit better off but in the habit of being cheap and is perhaps a bit angry at everyone around her who isn’t forced to spend some time in a Depression-style frugality purgatory. None at all. Perfectly secure and undefensive people use the word “autodidatic” all the time* when trying to excuse their lack of formal education, because everyone knows that just saying “I was a single mom and therefore couldn’t finish school” is something only quitters say, even if their chosen topic of expertise practically begs for the declaration that they went to the school of hard knocks.
Pat, I’m sure, makes a few bucks for being an About.com guide. And while About.com is probably pleased as punch to have another guide to write the columns which fill the space between the ads, it seems to me that maybe they should tighten up the standards a bit before they become another Associated Content.
On the other hand, it may already be too late:
The problem with throwing off marriage is that women opened themselves to becoming cheap prostitutes. In a marriage, a man is supposed to sacrifice himself for his wife. He is supposed to swear off all other women. He commits himself to love her and care for her - all aside from providing a significant portion of the family income. Without marriage? A guy doesn’t even have to buy a girl dinner. He doesn’t have to call her back. He can treat her like a Happy Meal. The sexual revolution that radical feminism promoted has allowed women to be viewed with far less respect and value than they were in the days when commitment was required. The result has been two generations now of women who find themselves feeling cheap and used and stupid - when they should have been honored and cherished.
I’d like to thank my favorite anti-femininsts for linking to these posts and exposing the true craptacularity of about.com.
*I totally knew what it meant before I looked up at dictionary.com, Pat. You’re not smarter than me!
This is my favorite:
So, the solution is too cut down to one income. Because when that wage earner is laid off you can survive on the tomatoes and parsnips the non-working partner has been so kind to grow for the health and well-being of the family. It makes perfect sense!
Yes, that part was particularly illogical!
As an experienced organic gardener, I can tell you right NOW that growing your own costs more, no question about it. The payoff is, you get food that actually HAS nutrients in it. If the FDA were doing it’s job, conventional farming would not exist: the product is devoid of most of it’s vitamins and nearly ALL of it’s microminerals.
But like knitting your own sweaters, growing your own food costs more but gives a vastly better product. Not to mention tastes better, and if you can pick it mere minutes before eating, the vitamins are stupid plentiful!
(I have no problem with one-income families, as long as they are willing to pay even the lowliest fulltime worker about 60 G’s. Seriously, where do the culture warriors get off, promoting one income families and simultaneously opposing wage hikes?)
I used to write for about.com quite some time ago, and even before the bubble burst the pay was next to nothing (like $10), took months to arrive and was actual payment often left up to the “section editor” (like a personal check).
That the Frugal Living section is open to a bizarre moral scold is unsurprising, because the About.com model seems around ten steps below The Discovery Center as place to become informed.
“Two incomes mean two cars, double the auto insurance, gas and maintenance - and a two car garage to hold them.”
Not only should you stay at home, you should really really stay at home! No car for you! You get to not only be deprived of adult company and conversation all day, you get to live with the constant fear and insecurity of financial devastation, with the knowledge that if something happens to your significant other, you are essentially unemployable! Same if you get divorced, so you are trapped in your marriage! Hurray! Plus, you get to literally be trapped at home! Especially if you live outside of a metro area, and there is no public transportation, and nothing within walking distance. No shopping (your job, by the way) until your significant other gets home. You get to shop at night (you don’t get to be tired, you should be grateful you’re being provided for!) or on the weekend (you don’t get weekends off, you lazy child-rearing baby factory! Don’t you love your children and want nothing more than to care for them 24/7/365 for the next 25-40 years of your life? Then your youth will be gone and you get to be a grandparent, you lucky person you! And you’re a bad immoral person if you don’t want this!)(does anyone really believe that she means for the male to stay at home?) Plus, why should you have a car to take your children to classes/music lessons/sports/playgrounds/playdates etc.? You should be frugal, even if that means social isolation and lack of mentally and physically enriching activities for your kids!
Wait, do I sound bitter? I should be grateful for my lot in life and my sacrifice to live a frugal lifestyle for the betterment (NOT!) of my children and myself. My bad.
“Empty houses are targets for burgleries, which raises insurance costs as well.”
That is truly original. Of all the mommy-stay-home arguments, I’ve never heard that one. And why stop there? Empty houses are dark and cold and no one is there to do the dishes and Fluffy is lonely and there might be a gas explosion started from a spark from the coffee maker you left on because you were in such a hurry to get to your Big Important Job and now *poof* you’re homeless and the cars got burned up too and you’re stuck in the suburbs and forced to ask some other career people to take you to town but they have to get to work and the Red Cross van can’t get out there because it ran out of gas and they can’t find any volunteers to serve you coffee because they all have Important Careers too and all your TV dinners are burned to nothing and then God sends down a rainstorm just to punish you and…
“It means paying more for taxes, more for parking and more for clothing than if one parent were to stay at home. Working costs money./Working can also put a household in a precarious position.”
Of course, because those Working Women will probably join the Radical Working Women of the World commie organization and pretty soon we’ll all be sharing uni-sex toilets and all women will be forced to wear power red blazers off to university, swear off baby-making and pledge allegiance to the Big Vagina herself, Gloria Steinem and her mentor, Hillary Clinton.
“If one wage earner is laid off, or cannot work for other reasons, it can mean bankruptcy for the family because the bills are so large and the lifestyle is dependent on both incomes….”
Exactly the dilemma those households with stupid working women face daily. Because of course, those women being women, they don’t save their money, but simply lavish it around like Martha Stewart on crack on a forever Macy’s One Day Sale.
“to make that choice with our eyes wide open, not just because that’s the thing to do or because we want a “more affluent” lifestyle.”
Because again, all women hear Martha’s marching orders and go to college and onto grad school because they can’t stop dreaming of having her own home to decorate with imported mahogany, the sheer joy of custom draperies and don’t forget the opportunity to threaten the Mexican maid with a tete-tete with the INS!
“He/she can do maintenance and other chores that would otherwise have to be paid for.”
Yes, to hell with the maid fantasies, there’s nothing that makes a woman feel like a Natural Woman than having the opportunity to compare Lemon Pledge with Endust, or to ponder the efficacy of clipping coupons or peruse such fine literature as, “101 Ways with Ground Beef”.
“…more young people are more dependent on parents to help or support them financially because they can’t find a job…”
That’s right! Having your son expect you to pick up after him until he’s forty is your motherly duty and don’t you forget it!
I can’t wait to see what other advice the wise sages at About.com have to offer us next!
This is hilarious; thanks for posting it. Other commenters have hit the highlights, but I can’t resist - in what universe does every two income household ‘need’ a two car garage and a McMansion? Please! And why would paying taxes on two incomes be a net loss when compared with halving the incomes and the taxes? This writer is out of her gourd.
P.S. “Empty houses are targets for burglaries…” Wait, The Patriarchy taught me (through Ashley Judd movies and security system commercials) that if I’m home without a husband, a serial rapist/killer is gonna get me. So shouldn’t I at least follow him to work and cower in the car knitting phalluses to worship until he’s ready to go home?
oooh, i hate how about.com tricks you during google searches sometimes … you think you’re getting something useful … then you get an about.com article …
Now when I think about about.com this is what I want to be thinking. Thank you, Diana.
Thanks for catching this. It’s been a long time since I’ve laughed at a critique like that. You should know that we’re currently looking for a new Guide to About Frugal Living who can offer the kinds of practical, actionable advice you mention in your post.
As for the quote from the About Conservatives site, I don’t always agree with the opinions of our political writers, but I do believe they have the right to speak their minds (and be criticized for it.)
There are also a number of inaccuracies in the above comments, particularly regarding how much we pay our freelancers at About.com. As of 1/1/07, Guides make a minimum of $725 per month, with the ability to do much better if they provide a solid user experience and grow their audience y/o/y.
About.com has always been a publish-first model, much like blogging, but we also have in-house editors whose job it is to make sure each site is living up to its potential. We were one of the first to do this, but there are many publishers (CNET, ZDNet, Time.com, etc.) who are starting to embrace the same model.
Sorry if this is too much inside baseball, but hopefully that helps clear things up a bit.
~ mike daecher
svp, content
about.com
“Wait, The Patriarchy taught me (through Ashley Judd movies and security system commercials) that if I’m home without a husband, a serial rapist/killer is gonna get me. So shouldn’t I at least follow him to work and cower in the car knitting phalluses to worship until he’s ready to go home?”
I am still incapable of proper breathing because of this line.