If we can see past preconceived limitations, then the possibilities are endless.
—Amy Purdy, Paralympian and entrepreneur
Hold up. Rewind. So how did I get to that middle-of-the-night money epiphany that I described in the introduction? The same way most of us reach our financial breaking point: slowly, then all at once.
By the time I’d reached my late twenties, I was a staff writer at a national news magazine, living in a trendy Brooklyn neighborhood. I had a killer wardrobe and a full social calendar. From the outside, I looked like I had it all together.
But it was an illusion. The truth was, I was broke.
I’d cashed out my first 401(k) retirement account, racked up more than a thousand dollars in credit card debt, and had only a few hundred dollars to my name. I was focused mostly on keeping my head above water financially and getting from one paycheck to the next. I wasn’t thinking about how much I needed to save or invest for my future because I assumed I’d be sharing it with someone else who was thinking about all that. I wasn’t worrying about how to earn enough to provide for a family because I assumed my future spouse would be the main earner.
I remember feeling tangible relief when I moved in with the man who would become my husband. Victor was then a research analyst at a startup, earning quite a bit more than I was. He had no debt. He was investing—not just in a retirement plan at work but in an E*TRADE account. And as I saw his investment balance rise each month, I felt assured that things would be fine.
So for the first few years of our relationship, I coasted. Victor was the one who found the great deal on the one-bedroom apartment we shared in Brooklyn. When we got married, he planned and paid for most of our honeymoon to Greece. And it was fantastic. While we split the rent and the cost of groceries down the middle, he managed and paid most of our bills. And I knew if I hit a rough patch, he would cover the rent.
I tried to save some money from each check, but if an unplanned expense came up—a gift for a colleague’s baby shower or an unexpected trip to urgent care—I often tapped that meager savings or used my credit card. When we moved in together, I had a new 401(k) plan through work, but I was contributing the 3 percent default amount my company had selected and not a penny more. I had no clue whether that would be enough to cover my retirement. It didn’t seem all that important at the time. Like a lot of women my age, I figured I had decades of steadily growing paychecks ahead—plus a partner who was already investing for both of us.
Then something happened that I hadn’t counted on. Victor started having financial challenges of his own. The startup went under and he took a series of lower-paying contract jobs. He eventually got a full-time offer from a magazine he loved, but not for the job or the salary he wanted. Suddenly it seemed like we were struggling to get by rather than getting ahead. The relief that I’d felt when we first moved in together was replaced by anxiety. How had I not planned for this possibility?
It hadn’t occurred to me that the man I married, who had an MBA and a better-paying job when we got engaged, might not always be in a position to take the lead in our financial lives. Or maybe I didn’t want to consider that possibility because I wasn’t sure I could (or wanted to) fill that role.
Even after my midnight wake-up call, when I realized I’d need to step up financially, I still struggled emotionally with the fact that I hadn’t prepared for this scenario. All my life, I’d gotten the message that I didn’t need to worry too much about money as long as I could cover my bills and save a little for a rainy day. That I didn’t need to think like a breadwinner because I would marry someone who did.
Now, for the first time, I began to grasp the hazards of that assumption.
Some women have a breadwinning mindset from the start and make the kinds of money choices that will set them up for life. (We’ll meet a lot of them in this book!) But a lot of us still aren’t raised that way, so we start thinking about how to support our future, or a family, only when it becomes necessary. And that can feel pretty jarring at first.
Around the same time I had my awakening, I started to notice other women around my age having similar revelations—finding themselves in situations they never expected to face.
One evening I was having cocktails downtown with a former magazine colleague, a bright blonde in her midthirties who was a successful editor, and single. When I asked her how work was going, she looked me in the eye. “I’m exhausted, Jenn. I have worked my butt off for nearly fifteen years without a break,” she said, tears suddenly welling up in her eyes. “Am I going to have to do this for the rest of my life?”
The possibility that she might have to support herself for life had only recently occurred to her. By this point, she told me, she’d expected to be married with kids—not playing the dating game in New York City, an increasingly high-stakes exercise that often ended in frustration. I knew the long hours she worked and the effort she’d already put into her career to get where she was. But while her job came with prestige, plus the pressure to be well coiffed and well dressed, it did not come with a huge salary. She was largely still living paycheck to paycheck. She’d seen marriage as offering relief from that cycle, so she hadn’t set aside much money for her future. Now when she looked ahead, she saw years of work and financial catch-up ahead of her. “I feel like I’m on a hamster wheel and I can’t get off,” she said. “I never expected it to be like this.”
Not long after, over dinner one night at a French bistro in midtown Manhattan, my friend Jessica told me that the man she’d been dating didn’t want to have kids. But she did. Initially, she’d thought she might convince him to change his mind. But she’d recently come to terms with the fact that if she wanted a baby, she might need to have and raise that child herself—something she had not prepared for financially. She was worried that she couldn’t support a child on her own, but at thirty-eight, she didn’t feel she had much more time to think about it.
Within months of our conversation, Jessica had broken up with her boyfriend and gone to a sperm bank. She left her job at a daily newspaper to take a public relations role at a hospital that paid more and offered better benefits and a more predictable work schedule. She had her son just before she turned forty. And—poof—just like that, she became a breadwinning single mom, a role she never expected to be in. She loved being a mom but confided later that she was still surprised at the way it had unfolded. “I never planned for this,” she told me.
In the months that followed, I began to take note of other women I knew, not just in New York but around the country, faced with responsibilities and circumstances they hadn’t expected. In the span of a year, two more friends in their late thirties became single moms, a transition that wasn’t easy for either financially. Two other friends were in the midst of getting a divorce, each with young kids they would need to support. Another friend’s husband lost his job, and her salary, which was considerably lower, became the only source of income for their family of four for several months—requiring the family to move to a smaller apartment and cut many of their expenses.
Even friends who weren’t shouldering all the financial responsibilities were feeling like they should play a more active role in their household finances.
Diane, a senior manager at a telecom company, said her husband had initially taken the lead in managing their investments. “He said he was building wealth for our future, and I wanted to believe what he was saying. But I should have pushed him for more details earlier,” she told me. She later learned that they weren’t earning nearly as much as he’d implied from the investments and that their financial situation wasn’t as secure as she’d thought. “I had a very different perception of our net worth than turned out to be the case,” said Diane. “Had I known, I would have made some very different money decisions.”
I soon discovered these sorts of conversations were happening among women all over the country as we realized that this narrative many of us were fed—that we don’t have to take full financial responsibility for ourselves—had left us vulnerable and without real agency over our lives.
What was going on here? How was it that so many smart, ambitious, well-educated women were finding themselves in situations they hadn’t prepared for? It was as if we’d all wandered blithely through our twenties and into our thirties, working hard in our careers, yes, but with the underlying assumption that at some point we’d be able to slow down. At some point we’d have a partner to help cover the bills and future plans.
We’d saved money, but mostly for short-term goals—like a new couch or a flight to visit family for the holidays. We weren’t thinking about saving money for a retirement we might be primarily responsible for covering, or to pay all the bills if a spouse lost a job, or to be able to afford to have and raise a baby solo. We weren’t thinking about preparing financially for the possibility of supporting ourselves for the long term—much less supporting anyone else.
And yet, as we entered our midthirties or forties, we found ourselves facing one of those scenarios. And we were left reeling. It felt as if someone had unexpectedly changed the plotline halfway through our story and left us wondering, How did I end up here?
As a financial journalist, my instinct was to take a deep dive into the data to look for clues. I spent hours poring over U.S. Census Bureau and Department of Labor reports, studying demographic trends. I started asking questions—of friends, coworkers, gender studies experts, and financial advisors—trying to determine where our assumptions had come from and what they were based on, if not reality.
What I discovered is that for many women raised in a middle-class household—whether we were born in the 1970s or the ’90s—a lot of the ideas and expectations we picked up around money aren’t just disempowering; they’re outdated. Our parents may have passed along what they’d experienced or believed would be true for us. But many of the long-standing assumptions upon which their ideas were based no longer apply.
In 1960, nearly three-quarters of the U.S. adult population was married, and divorce rates were relatively low. So it made sense to count on getting and staying married. But since the 1980s, the marriage rate has been on the decline. By 2014, single Americans actually outnumbered married ones for the first time in history! More than half of Americans between eighteen and thirty-four today say they aren’t in a relationship—a record high.
The average age of first-time mothers in the United States has also risen, from twenty-one years old in 1972 to twenty-seven today—and to thirty for women with a college degree. And more of us are raising those kids by ourselves. Nearly one in four kids in this country is growing up with a single mom—an unprecedented number. Data show there are actually more single millennial moms than married ones!
What’s particularly telling is that the birth rate for unmarried teens and single moms without a college degree—historically the group with the highest rates of single motherhood—has actually decreased sharply over the last decade. Meanwhile, birth rates have grown among unmarried women thirty-five years or older. “I don’t think people realize that there are a lot of older women now who are having babies deliberately, single mothers by choice,” Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told the New York Times in 2015.
Of course, when we’re fantasizing about our futures, we probably aren’t picturing ourselves among those numbers. Jessica and my other friends certainly weren’t. Who wants to believe that we may not find a partner as early as we hope or that we may end up raising kids on our own? Most of us are still trying to wrap our heads around the idea of being financially responsible for ourselves. This doesn’t mean we’re all destined to end up divorced or to stay single a lot longer than we’d planned. But it means we can’t necessarily count on a partner picking up most of the expenses or the financial responsibility for our future—even if we were raised to believe we could.
It’s not just that men are trained from a young age to be providers, but that women are actually discouraged from thinking of ourselves as breadwinners every step of the way—steered into lower-paying fields and urged to spend money on disposable items that make us more attractive rather than investing in assets that can grow in value and make us wealthy. Billions of marketing dollars and years of cultural conditioning are still aimed at keeping women in debt and focused on spending; thinking of ourselves as consumers, not providers; and equating dependency with security.
“But if I become the breadwinner, who will take care of me?” one thirty-five-year-old marketing manager asked me when we discussed the likely possibility that she would outearn a partner. And I get it. Millions of us have been brought up to believe that “being taken care of” by a man means he’s carrying the bulk of the financial responsibilities.
The fantasy of being taken care of financially is seductive—on the surface anyway. That’s one reason it’s persisted for so long, even in the face of shifting data. A 2015 Georgetown study, “Who Should Bring Home the Bacon?,” found that even with the rise of dual-income households, the majority of men and women still said they prefer the husband to be the primary earner.
At first, counting on a man to be the main earner can feel like a relief. It certainly did to me. In fact, it seemed perfectly natural. It’s what my own mom did when I was young, when she’d stayed home to care for my sister and me, and what the moms of almost all my friends had done, too.
But here’s the problem. That setup is not just unrealistic for many of us now; it’s also precarious. Being dependent on a partner to fund your future means that you have less control over how that future turns out. And having a partner who outearns you and covers most expenses now doesn’t guarantee it will be that way for good—or even for long.
For one thing, as you’ve probably heard, nearly half of all marriages end in divorce.
I know. That’s a bummer to think about. But even if you feel certain your union is for life, it doesn’t hurt to be prepared just in case. Most of the time if someone tells us there is a nearly 50 percent possibility of a certain outcome, we’ll prepare for it. Fifty percent chance of rain today? We bring an umbrella. Fifty percent chance that the path of that hurricane is going to cut through our city? We stock up on flashlights, batteries, and other supplies. Fifty percent chance that a coin toss will end in our favor? We’re not going to bet all our money on tails.
But none of us goes into marriage thinking about the probability that the union may not last. (Where’s the romance in that?) In fact, we’re discouraged from talking or even thinking about divorce. Almost every marriage entails some entangling of finances, but preparing for the possibility that we may need to disentangle them again someday isn’t just depressing; it flies in the face of the “happily ever after” narrative and intense marketing that tells us true love—like a diamond—is forever.
Still, the fact is that there’s a decent chance we’ll end up single again, even if we tell ourselves it won’t happen to us. And research shows that women usually get the short end of the stick in a divorce. One government study found that women’s household income fell by 41 percent after a divorce, more than twice as much as men’s did. A divorce isn’t cheap: The legal costs alone can add up to tens of thousands of dollars. But having your own money means that if a marriage isn’t working, you won’t feel stuck in it for financial reasons—and if your spouse initiates the divorce, you’ll be okay financially.
When Gloria got married in her twenties, she worked at a nonprofit organization in Washington, D.C., and her husband worked in technology. “He was making good money, so I didn’t think I needed to make a lot,” she said. “He made all the decisions. He picked the house. He chose the car. I just put my paycheck into our joint account, which seems silly now. But I didn’t think there was anything wrong with it at the time.”
Then in 2016, when their three sons ranged from five to thirteen years old, Gloria and her husband got divorced, and she got full custody. Even with the child support payments, she says she struggled financially after the split. “No way did I ever imagine being in this position,” said Gloria, who eventually got a better-paying job as a budget analyst in Maryland and began picking up side jobs like event planning and freelance writing to earn extra income. “Now my focus is really on making more money. My mindset has changed since the divorce. I still love a good romance story. I still believe in all of that. But I also believe that things happen—and it doesn’t just have to be a divorce. We need to be realistic and have our own money, and plan for those possibilities from the beginning.”
Here’s the other thing to consider: Even if you do stay married, the likelihood that your spouse will outearn you is slipping. A paradigm shift is underway in the breadwinning model.
Over the last half century, the percentage of families in which only a father works has fallen by half, to just one in five families. Not only are more women working, but in nearly 40 percent of heterosexual marriages, we are now bringing home the bigger paycheck. An estimated 15 million wives were the primary earners in their household pre-pandemic, more than 30 percent of them because their spouses were unemployed. And that didn’t include the estimated 6.5 million unmarried women in cohabiting opposite- or same-sex couples who were the primary earners.
In one 2018 NBC News–Wall Street Journal poll, 49 percent of employed women in the United States said that they were their family’s main breadwinner. Even in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, as millions of Americans lost their jobs (and women were disproportionately affected), a 2020 report by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research calculated that moms were still contributing at least 40 percent of household earnings in half of the more than 30 million U.S. families with kids under age eighteen.
You might think that means that we are getting more comfortable taking the lead when it comes to making and managing money. But when I started digging into the data and talking to women who were the primary providers for their households, it became clear that this was not necessarily the case. If it were, do you think we’d still accept being paid 82 cents (or less) for every dollar a man earns? Or that we’d still significantly outnumber men in the lowest-paying career fields while men continue to outnumber us in the highest-paying roles across every sector? And no matter how successful we are in our careers or in other areas of our lives, too many of us still manage our money begrudgingly, handing the financial reins over to the men in our lives as soon as we can.
So if the assumptions haven’t changed, how is it that so many women became the sole or primary breadwinner for their families?
The Great Recession of 2008 played a pivotal role. In the past dozen years, the main-earner role flipped within many marriages after millions of men lost their jobs. The recession created the largest jobless rate among American men since World War II. Men lost 5.4 million jobs between December 2007 and June 2009—more than double the number of jobs that women lost. Some of those jobs never came back.
So millions of women became the main earners by default.
Many men—like my husband—found themselves struggling to maintain the same income and lifestyle that their own fathers had. The average guy today is earning less in inflation-adjusted terms than his dad made at the same age. The percentage of men working today is actually lower than it was a decade ago and is expected to continue to decline.
Meanwhile, the number of women in the workforce has grown. In the 1950s, less than 40 percent of women between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-four worked. By 2019, more than 75 percent of women in that age group did. At the end of 2019, for the first time, more women than men were in the workforce. While the coronavirus pandemic wiped out some of the job gains women have made, the number was expected to rebound as the economy did and as regular school schedules and childcare help resumed. Even in the pandemic, women’s earnings continued to account for a significant percentage of many households’ total income.
I wish I could say that my late-night wake-up call was immediately followed by a breakthrough in thinking about my money and my ability to grow it. But the sudden recognition that I shouldn’t depend on my husband initially left me reeling.
When I spoke with other women in similar positions, they told me they’d experienced the same sort of vertiginous feelings as they confronted the voice inside that whispered, This isn’t the way it was supposed to be.
Soon after she got married in her twenties, Akima, a thirty-eight-year-old who runs a production company in Georgia, began outearning her husband. Looking back, she can see there were plenty of signs that she would wind up as the breadwinner; when he was still finishing his bachelor’s degree, she was already wrapping up her master’s. Still, she said, she continued to tell herself he’d catch up soon. “The reality is that men usually make more than women, and I thought he had the potential to surpass me. I really didn’t expect to be the breadwinner for long—I thought the gap would close. Instead, it got wider,” said Akima, who eventually got divorced and is raising their son.
Susan, a healthcare consultant in Chicago and mother of two, knew she would be the main earner initially because she got a great-paying job straight out of school. “Ultimately, though, I thought our salaries would end up being comparable—in fact, I thought we would be this great power couple,” she remembered. She didn’t count on her husband being laid off early in his career. She never imagined that he would struggle for several months to find another job. Even after he found a new role, her earnings continued to far exceed his, and she carried most of the financial responsibilities. “It turned out to be the opposite of what I’d expected,” she said.
The crux of the resistance so many women feel about becoming, or even identifying as, a breadwinner often comes back to that: We never expected to be in a position to have to provide for ourselves—much less anyone else—for the long term. So we feel unprepared to assume the role.
Women are more comfortable leaning into their careers, but still don’t expect to be the main earner in the household, Marianne Cooper, Ph.D., a sociologist at the Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab at Stanford University, told me. “Culturally there’s been a huge transformation with women becoming breadwinners, but there has not been as much of a shift in identity and then, literally, in [learning] the skills that help you do it. There’s this discourse that women need to be financially empowered, but then there’s this competing discourse that someone will take care of you,” Cooper said. “Traditional gender norms are really hard to upend.”
I definitely felt that. But once I was finally able to let go of what I’d thought my role as a woman, wife, and mother “should” look like and embrace the breadwinner mindset, it profoundly changed my life—and even my marriage—for the better. It was as if I’d unlocked a whole new range of possibilities for my life. (That’s why I’m writing this book!) And many of the breadwinner-minded women I interviewed told me they’d experienced a similar transformation. You’ll meet some of them in the coming chapters.
What I’ve come to realize is that, whether it’s planned for or not, women are increasingly likely to be the primary financial support for themselves, and maybe others, too. The reality is, we can’t afford not to think like a breadwinner anymore.
And whether or not we do become the main earner in a relationship, adopting a breadwinning mindset can help us feel more empowered and confident about our capabilities and our futures.
So why aren’t more of us being raised as breadwinners already? I set off to find out.