Question to those of you who are a dual-income households

[MarkInCA]

For those of you who have dual incomes, if the lower income were to disappear, how long could your household last (on your current budget, with no major changes) on the higher income alone (assuming of course the higher income has no risk of disappearing)?

[disneysteve]

I voted even though right at this moment we only have one income. We have had 2 incomes for the past 8-10 years. My wife left her most recent job in 2013. Her income has always been surplus for our household. We live on my income just fine and mainly used hers to beef up savings and investments.

[MonkeyMama]

I voted since we were dual income at some point.

Indefinitely. We never lived up to second income. My spouse had an equal wage and we lost it 12 years ago. I am still on track to retire early.

I think a lot of people could manage better than they think they could, due to taxes and the other costs of working. I've watched a lot of people try to wrap their brain around the idea of losing HALF their income. IT's a pointless mind exercise. We never literally took a 50% take-home pay cut. Our income tax rate has been -0- most years my spouse has not worked. Plus, him not working saves us tons of money in other ways.

[scfr]

Indefinitely ... on either (or neither) income.
The reason we don't retire right now (low-50's) is because it would be a rice & beans existences with nothing left over to share with others. We could live that way, but choose not to.

[bigdaddybus]

I voted "more than a year but we would go broke eventually".

Our dual income split is roughly 55%/45% so one person leaving would have a huge impact. We could live on savings and one income for a yr but after that we would need to downsize in some ways (kids activities, home, etc) before we really started feeling some pain. Both of us have been working at our current careers for 15+ years so one of us loosing our job would be a huge and unexpected hit to our finances.

[MarkInCA]

I too voted indefinitely. I have a condo that I was living in and making payments on by myself without any extra income. Then my girlfriend moved in last year, so anything she contributes is just extra.

I'm curious about those who responded with 'a month tops'... is it because your spending is too high? or income is too low? both? And are there any plans to improve the situation in any way?

[phantom]

We went through a stretch a couple years back where we did without the higher of our two incomes for about a year and a half. But, we were never completely without a second source of income. There was always either unemployment coming in, or there was money from short contract jobs coming in. It was stressful, but we could manage like that indefinitely if we had to.

I voted "More than a year" though. We're really close to being able to survive on the higher of our two incomes, but we're not quite there yet. Cutting out all savings and some unnecessary spending makes things look really close on paper. But, even assuming lower taxes, it seems like we'd still be just a little short every month.

[Eagle]

I voted indefinitely. We have always just relied on my income. If I were to loose my job we having emergency savings to account for the in-between jobs time. My wife only worked part-time previously as she's always wanted to be a SAHM.

That said, when the kids get older and are in school she may go back to work like in DisneySteve's situation to help us beef up savings/retirement. Or to help contribute towards paying the mortgage early.

[Bright]

We are a primarily 1 income household but I do work a few hours a week. We do not spend my income from work. I am voting indefinitely. It would be down right super comfy on one income without all the investing coming out. Just fine with it coming out also.

[krantcents]

I always tried to keep our expenses low enough to live on just my income. My wife's income allows to do many of extra things such as travel, extra savings or some luxuries.

[kork13]

Realistically, we could easily go on indefinitely with just one income. With that said, it would require significantly cutting down the level of our savings & debt payments. Comparatively, our incomes are about 60/40, so losing mine would be more of an impact than losing hers. For now, our plan is to live off of my income & use hers to save/invest/payoff debt.

[frugalredhead]

I'm one of the people who voted for "a month tops" (only because "2 days tops" wasn't an option), LOL. DH and I earn about 50/50 when you don't count my income from my 2nd job. Right now we are in the early stages of paying off a ton of credit card debt so if we lost one of our incomes we wouldn't even be able to pay minimums. Obviously if one of us did lose our job, we'd sell a car, cancel cable, etc.... but with our current bills, we wouldn't be able to make it long at all. We'll get there though!! We are 3 years away from being free of credit card debt, and then it won't take long to pay off our other installment debts.

[BuckyBadger]

It depends on what you mean by "making it."

We earn pretty close to the same amount, but even individually we make quite a bit of money, relatively speaking. If we went down to one income we could certainly keep the house, but we would have to cut out other things. We wouldn't save as much as we do now. We wouldn't go out to dinner as much. We would take cheaper vacations.

So we could live forever, but our lifestyle and our savings would be downsized.

[feh]

DW went back to work last year; for the 15 years prior, we were a single income family.

100% of her salary now goes to retirement accounts.

[LivingAlmostLarge]

Indefinitely. We were never really ever dual income. Only in graduate school and that was peanuts. So we have no idea what it would be like to live with double the income. I am 35 and based on our savings we could probably be retired with college pretty well funded in 10 years and my spouse is turning 37 later this year. So very early retirement without struggle I am going to guess. We are halfway to 25x what we live on now or 1/3 for 33x (4% or 3% WR in retirement). And it's taken us 9 years. If I had to guess we might hit the number 7 years or less. And we live comfortably NOT rice and beans at all (travel, steak, college for kids). Based on a bare bones budget I bet we could retire now. According to Mr Money Mustache we have more than he did when he retired. But we want a nicer lifestyle.