Forgone opportunities, Tips #5-8

5. Understand that your income may be significantly lower once you re-enter the job market than it would have been if you had had a career for your entire adult life. Penny understood that by marrying Randall and having two children with him, she would have to give up her full-time job in corporate accounting. When she finally went back to work in her home-based consulting outlet after her son entered first grade and her daughter started preschool, her income was about a third of what it was before she left the business world.

6. Think about the long-term consequences of the expenses you incur as a couple, particularly those that one benefits from and one earns the money to finance. Mickey decided that he would fund Guadalupe’s medical school even though she would make more money than he did. When their marriage failed just as she finished her M.D., she walked away with the ability to earn a handsome living as a pediatrician, while he left without much of anything. It was a chance they took, and neither of them did it maliciously or opportunistically. They were two well-intentioned people with a gamble that failed.

7. If you are going to be in a lifelong competition with your spouse over money and upward mobility, you probably should save yourself decades of heartache and skip the marriage. Doyle pouted about how low his income was—at $200,000 a year—because he didn’t have his own medical clinic the way his wife Roxanne did. He could not accept, seemingly, that he enjoyed a greater standard of living than 95% of Americans.

8. Never be so consumed with the pursuit of money that you forget the people those dollars are being earned to benefit. Preston and Elsie made over $300,000 a year when they were first married, but having children meant they could not each dump 80 hours a week into their work life.