The Real Cost of a Dual Income Family

It was a Monday morning, around 10:00 a.m., and I was driving around trying to cram in a bunch of errands. I had a meeting with a client about 45 minutes away from home, around 1 p.m. We had family photos coming up and I needed to exchange my son's shirt and pants for a bigger size. I needed to grab some additional cold brew coffee from Costco for our upcoming camping trip, and I had a return near a store where my client meeting was. With all this on my mind, I couldn’t help but wonder, how did we ever do this both having a 9-5 job?

I’m not going to lie...it crosses my mind...a lot. The stress of having two working individuals with a kid (I don’t know how people do it with more than one!) and trying to get everything done is crazy. It’s no wonder burnout is so real. I can't tell you the number of times I have taken calls, been answering IMs, or just deep in thought at a Dr's appointment, sporting event, or even just family dinner.

In our household, we have always done a good job splitting overall family responsibilities 50/50. When we were both at the same company, managing the family parts was even easier. For example, we could leverage each other's calendar to arrange school and sports drop-offs and pickups. “Who’s going to do the grocery shopping this week?” or “Can you swing by the store on your way home to grab X?” were common things we were constantly bouncing back and forth via IM.

In hindsight though, my wife and I had been through periods like this before. When we first launched Radio Chatter, we were doing everything 50/50, both household and the business. It was stressful. There were many debates and disagreements, and it got to the point where we had to make a decision on our roles and responsibilities. The decision was: I work on building the business, and my wife keeps our life afloat but she retains the creative direction of our products. Keep in mind, this was still at a time that it was in addition to both of us working full time. It worked for a while, but then life just got busy, and so did my work, and Radio Chatter took a back seat. Then, things went back to more of the 50/50 for a while.

This balance got revisited again when my work picked up exponentially: long days, working seven days a week, no holidays. It was brutal and not good for the family. I had already made up my mind that I was leaving at this time, luckily, but I needed to power through to get to the date I had set. I hunkered down, did my job, and my wife kept the ship afloat… again… in addition to holding her own full-time job. Again, super stressful, and probably the most stressed we have been in a very long time.

Then came my turn when I left the W2 to take the reins. We agreed that everything would default to me. Drop-off and pick-up from school? Me. Running those errands (take this to the post office, grab the dog food, do this return, etc.) all defaulted to me. When I say “default,” it just means my wife can count on me to do these things unless I need to make a change. For example, every Friday morning I have a meeting with my business partners so that is her day to do school drop-off. Or sometimes I have a networking event and she will take our son to his sports practice (something we all do as a family).

Generally, this has worked out and taken a load off my wife. It's much easier than trying to negotiate who is doing what each week, which was exhausting. However, we had an interesting conversation the other day after a discussion about sports. My wife was starting to feel like she didn’t know what was going on and was “out of the loop.” Emails would come through about camp or sports, and if I wasn’t on them, they would get forwarded to me to ensure we hit the mark. This “default to Paul” started having a negative impact on her.

During this conversation, she said something to the effect of, “I can totally see how in a relationship, the responsibilities can become imbalanced and that imbalance just continues to snowball, leaving one person doing it all.” Now, commonly this is the wife taking on these additional burdens and the husband being on the sidelines. Regardless, it happens when someone gets busy and the other takes the grunt of it. If there is not a re-balance, the scales will permanently tip.

Not only does the time and distribution of work come into play in a dual-working household, but there is a negative financial impact too. Many times, this shows up as “convenience spending.” Amazon Prime anyone? In the book Your Money or Your Life, the authors discuss “Your Real Hourly Wage,” which is your normal working hours plus the “approximate extra job-related hours” (commuting, education, etc.) minus job-related expenses (housekeeping, coffee, clothes, etc.).

As I reflected on that, here are some expenses we have decreased that were driven by having a dual-income family:

1. Housekeeping
2. Amazon
3. Starbucks

I mentioned in my 90-day check-up that I cancelled housekeeping. While not primarily financially driven, it does save $400 per month right now. However, I have a feeling I’m not doing as well in July with this and may be fired from this part of my job with an experienced housekeeper back on payroll. Funny thing, I am writing this on the day I am supposed to be cleaning. Hmm, maybe that's the problem.

We haven’t had Amazon Prime since January 2025 and only did a short 7-day trial recently because we needed something for camping that we could only find on Amazon. An interesting, non-scientific observation: we bought a lot of convenience things that week, mostly related to the camping trip, because we could. We cancelled Amazon primarily because we thought we were buying things too often and things that weren’t necessary, but also because we wanted to support local. Especially as I looked to acquire a small business, I felt it was important to support them. Honestly, it’s been way easier than I thought it would be and some of that could be because we no longer need the convince of super fast shipping.

Starbucks was also a regular for me in the first quarter of 2025. It was common to meet people up for a chat and get a coffee, often paying for someone else’s. Also, I stopped quite a bit on the way to work because my commute was long and terrible. What is also terrible is we have a nice coffee machine at home but I would always leave thinking I was good and then would have a Starbucks in hand before hitting the highway.

Other things that could be decreased but we haven’t seen because of our priorities.

1. Lunches – generally once a week per person; I’ve always packed most days for everyone so not a huge decrease. However, because I don't have to be to work at a specific time, these once per week 'I don't have time to pack lunches so just buy' doesn't happen anymore.
2. Clothes – not a high spend for me anyway
3. Gas / car payments – not decreased for us; I used to have a company car and gas
4. Gifts for coworkers / other donations (kids' sports, fundraisers, Girl Scout cookies, etc.)
5. Happy hours – I still have these, so no decrease on my end

One of the things going into this journey that my wife and I agreed on was that our general style of living would not change. Meaning, we would be more mindful of our spending, but we wouldn’t say no to meeting friends for dinner, going to a sporting event, concert (my personal favorite), or any of the other luxuries we had grown accustomed to and felt were part of the lifestyle we wanted. So naturally, we are drawing down on our savings to live this lifestyle, as I discussed in my article about finances. Which means the primarily single-income family we have (I have made some money, thank you!) isn’t sustainable long-term.

Which brings me to my final thought: there is a case to be made for dual-income couples with children to have at least one individual in the household be an entrepreneur. I spoke about this with someone recently who is a freelance photographer and videographer. He mentioned how it is game-changing to have the flexibility to handle a lot of the family stuff that is difficult or can’t wait until evenings and weekends with the freelance schedule flexibility. I am seeing this first hand now.

As the average age of first-time parents is getting older (see Bowling Green State University analysis), that means there is more of an entrepreneurship opportunity of leaving the corporate world to go out on your own. I’ve heard multiple citations, from the Money with Katie podcast to the book Entrepreneurial Leap, that the average age for those taking their entrepreneurship journey is around 40 - exactly when I decided to leave corporate America.

As I continue to work through the entrepreneurship journey of my own companies (Radio Chatter and my coaching/consulting business) along with the acquisition piece, it’s something on my mind. Would buying a business still provide that freedom I have, or would we be back to the typical dual-income household looking to add back all those conveniences? Which are convenient, but still don’t negate the stress of managing it all.

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