Member-only story
My husband and I live in different socioeconomic classes
And I’m not sure how I feel about it
My husband is an software engineer. I am a musician. Given this, it shouldn’t surprise anyone to hear that he earns about 15 times what I earn. We both contribute to a joint household account for household expenses: for me, that means I contribute about $500 per month, or roughly 25% of what I earn in an average month; he contributes approximately $3700 per month to the same account (or approximately 12% of his average monthly income).
Our joint household account is used to pay our mortgage, HOA fees, property taxes, groceries, cat food, vet bills, utilities, and one weekly “date night” dinner. Recently, as prices have started to increase, my husband has expressed distress over how expensive everything is getting, so I offered to increase my contribution to $600 per month (seeing as how the expenses that increased the most were cat food and vet bills, and part of the reason for that is because we took in my mother’s elderly cat after my mother died in May of last year. And since I got a modest inheritance from my mother, in a sense “she” is paying for her cat.)
I’m seeing the numbers now as I type and it’s kind of making my stomach hurt. We don’t have children. I have student loans, fortunately on forbearance now like everyone else’s…
