My Fiancé Wants Me to Pay Our Household Expenses for 10 Years

This is part of Help! Wanted, a special series from Slate advice. In the advising biz, there are certain eternal dilemmas that bedevil letter writers and columnists alike. This week, we’re taking them head-on.

In this edition, Elizabeth will be taking a look at some questions that might feel familiar: split expenses, affording a family, and gift-giving dilemmas. Pay Dirt is Slate’s money advice column. Have a question? Send it to Athena and Elizabeth here. (It’s anonymous!)

Dear Pay Dirt,

My fiancé moved in last year, we’re in our 50s and marrying soon. He believes he shouldn’t have to contribute to the household expenses like rent, utilities, household items, and, groceries. I have a fixed income, equal to his salary and I will join his medical plan, so I will save there. He says when he retires in 10 years we’ll rely on his retirement to pay for all the expenses. And that we’ll use my equally sizable savings in our 80s! He has no other savings and uses his current income to pay off small debts from before we came together and repairs on his rental property. He also has parent loans that he’ll start paying soon. He owns a rental property that pays the mortgage. A financial advisor provided us a decent outlook after retirement and we’re not millionaires by any stretch. I’m frustrated to be paying for everything. He says the math says it all. I’m just concerned he’s not seeing the “what ifs” between now and 10 years and what this feels like to me from a commitment and financial standpoint.

—Oh, I Get the Math!

Dear Oh, I Get the Math,

Your fiancé’s analysis of the situation presumes a lot: Firstly, that you’ll still be together and alive in your 80s. I don’t mean to sound macabre, or pessimistic about your marriage, but people do get hit by buses! Your fiancé needs to understand that all sorts of things could happen between now and this theoretical retirement. He could lose his job. One of you could become very sick and need medical treatment.

Aside from that, your fiancé’s math sounds very wonky to me. As far as I can tell, the only savings you get are on the health insurance front, and while health insurance is expensive, I cannot possibly believe that it’s more expensive than your rent. You are basically supporting your fiancé financially while he uses his income to pay off debts. It seems like you didn’t sign on to that. (You should also know that you might be liable for some of those debts if you’re married and co-mingle your assets, so make sure you have a clear picture of what he owes before you tie the knot.)

If your fiancé is resistant to working through this and coming up with something that more equally distributes the financial responsibility for your expenses now, you need to think about whether you’re prepared to make a commitment as big as marriage if nothing improves.

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Dear Pay Dirt,

My husband and I would really like to have our first child, and soon, but when we started planning and crunching the numbers, I genuinely don’t know how we’re going to swing it. My company offers no paid family leave, so I’ll have to aggressively save to cover six to 12 weeks of no pay. I’m the breadwinner (my husband works in a restaurant and gets no benefits) and so we’d all be on my job’s pretty mediocre health insurance plan. With the addition of a child, it would be about $800 a month just for insurance. Neither of us can afford to stay home, but daycare in our area runs around $1,800 a month for somewhere average, and we definitely do not have an extra $2,000 a month lying around. We live in a very high-cost-of-living area where we likely will never be able to afford a home, and rent just keeps going up, but our families live here and we’ll need the village. And finally, I’m on lifelong medication that will prevent me from being able to breastfeed, so I’ll need to buy formula. We’re not poor people and have middle-class jobs, so I don’t know why this feels so impossible. I’m in my mid-30s and starting to feel hopeless, but then I see plenty of people around me having kids and somehow just making it work. I always dreamed of having two or three children and now it’s looking like I might not even be able to have one. Do you have any practical advice for affording a family?

—Who Can Afford a Family?

Dear Who Can Afford a Family,

I have exactly one child, and they are indeed expensive. If you’re not independently wealthy, you will absolutely have to forgo some things you’d otherwise spend on. But as you acknowledge, people have children all the time with far fewer resources than you have and they make it work. It is truly appalling that we live in one of the only developed countries that does not, as a matter of policy, support new families with things like paid leave. Still, there are ways.

First, you have to accept that circumstances are never going to be perfectly ideal. No matter how much you plan and save, it’s still going to be hard, especially during the first year. It’s also unlikely that you will be able to perfectly control the timing if you choose to have a child. Getting pregnant isn’t a straightforward process for a lot of people.

That said, you have a lot of advantages. You both have jobs. Your family lives nearby. You make middle-class money. (Your expectations are also very middle class: Two weeks of maternity leave is the norm at a lot of companies, and you’re thinking more along the lines of six to 12.)

The biggest thing, though, is that you have to decide that being a parent is more important to you than some of the other things you’re planning for, like home ownership. In expensive cities, many people are lifelong renters and there’s nothing wrong with that. In other countries like Germany, people prefer to rent and don’t particularly consider home ownership a desirable goal. This is not to say that having a child would take that option off the table—your careers may change, and your income with it—but if it did, would it make you materially unhappier than being childless? Along the same lines, is living in a less expensive area an option?

Also: Remember that some of these expenses are temporary. Even if you have to buy formula, it’ll be for a few months, not a few years. Childcare expenses are also front-loaded because once your children are in school, and older, you need less of it.

The best hack for making it work financially, however, is finding your village now and leaning into opportunities to share resources and information. You can share the cost of child care, buy necessary items used or borrow things that you’ll only need for a short time. (People overestimate what they need anyway. The Baby Industrial Complex will convince you that you need six different kinds of bassinets, co-sleepers, etc. You do not.) My 8-year-old son’s wardrobe is something like 65 percent hand-me-downs and this has not damaged his hilariously specific sense of style.

It’ll also be reassuring to you to hear from people in similar circumstances. Ask your friends who’ve had kids how they made it work and what they’d do differently. I don’t think your constraints are really financial, they’re about what sort of compromises you’re willing to make. Your village can help you figure that out.

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Dear Pay Dirt,

I think my dad’s love language is giving gifts. We don’t live near each other, and we’re quite close. We talk pretty much every other day on the phone about what we’re up to and casual things. Well, I can’t even bring up needing something/wanting something from the store without my dad not only offering to buy it for me (I always brush him off) but oftentimes purchasing said thing on Amazon or whatever app for me before the conversation is even over! It’s very sweet and I love him for it. But also, I don’t want him spending his money on me for things I was already going to purchase anyway! Not to mention, sometimes these also come entangled with more aesthetic decisions and I’ll end up with a version of something I didn’t particularly want. How should I handle this? Just let him anyway? I’ve tried avoiding the subject altogether but it slips out sometimes, and even something innocuous like “I’m not sure what to make for dinner tonight” can trigger offers for takeout or food delivery. I have a good job and don’t need his help in this way—and I feel awkward taking it from him when I know he should be a bit more frugal as he nears retirement.

—The Giver

Dear the Giver,

This is more of a you problem than a dad problem. You acknowledge that he does this as a way of showing love, and it apparently brings him some joy to do it. Unless he’s making wildly inappropriate purchases (shipping you a new puppy, perhaps) or spending himself into financial insecurity, there’s no harm in just saying thank you and not feeling obligated to use everything he sends you. It’s clearly making your dad feel like he’s caring for you in a way, even if you’re separated by distance—and I’m also quite sure he knows you don’t, strictly speaking, need the things he’s sending you.

However, I say this is more of a you problem because you already know what triggers his buying impulses. I realize it might be a bit of a pain to censor yourself on that front, and you say you’ve tried to do it, but I know you can get through a conversation with your dad without mentioning something you want or need from the store. I believe in you! If this is the kind of thing that you do talk about regularly, avoiding it is probably a matter of practice more than anything and being more mindful of what you’re discussing. If shopping is a frequent topic of discussion, telling him about things you’ve already bought is fine, but you absolutely know what the consequences will be if you tell him about something you’re planning to buy.

—Elizabeth

We know we messed up. We did not tell our daughter (now 22 years old) that she was adopted. I know the current best practice is to tell children basically from birth, but we didn’t, and with each passing year it became more impossible to tell her now. And so we just pretended it would never come up.