Income keeps going up but husband doesn’t want to outsource any chores

[gembeldolar]

My husband and I are high income. I came from a middle class background, he’s from a lower-middle class background. We’ve been together over five years, married with a one year old.

Moved into a much bigger house last year and with that have more chores. Laundry. Cleaning. Lawn care. Dishes. It’s nonstop.

He refuses to hire out any of this work. His mom’s a cleaning lady and he keeps saying he’d quit running (he ran 1000 miles last year) before hiring someone to clean our house. Ok but that’s never happening so … why even act like it’s an option?

Generally I just pick away at some things during the week and we clean the house deeply before we have parties a few times a year. That means our floors get washed max once a month. Bathrooms cleaned 1-2 x a month. And it takes so much time and exhausts him to do. He spends hours and hours on lawn care. Our house isn’t messy but I hate spending so much time on this.

If we spent 5% of our take home pay on a cleaner and lawn care we’d get so much time an energy back but he still has this mindset like we make as much as we did five years ago. I just got a huge promotion and I feel like I can’t do anything to make my life easier.

Any thoughts?

 

[monkeym24]

@gembeldolar I would tell him that this is really important to you - It’s not about just getting out of chores because you don’t like them, it’s about recognizing that there are only 24 hours in a day and if you spend 3 hours a day cleaning, that’s 3 hours you can’t be spending time with your child or exercising or talking with your husband - the things you can’t (and wouldn’t want to) outsource!

He may not want to hire a cleaning service, but why should you have to sacrifice your very limited free time cleaning when you want to hire the service?

I’d divide up the chores (for example, you are in charge of weekly vacuum, dust, kitchen, and bathrooms, and he is in charge of all exterior cleaning and landscaping). Then tell him you will be hiring a cleaning service to cover yours and that you support him whether he decides to do his tasks himself or outsource them.

 

[ansem]

@monkeym24 This is exactly the mindset that I'm using to keep myself from overworking myself -- if I'm not getting paid more money to offset the stress elsewhere in my life, I'm not taking on more stress.

And if you do take on more stress to increase your income, I think it's well worth it to use that financial capacity to give yourself more time, energy, and mental capacity in your personal life. You're not paying for services to be lazy, you're paying for services so that you can feel like you're thriving.

I can tell you that we've struggled to maintain our house for the last four years and no one has come to give us a gold medal for it. The only recognition I get is from my husband and the fancy little "ding" my cleaning app does when I mark it complete. In fact, what we've gotten is guilt-trips from people because we don't also have the capacity to be responsible for all outings and get-togethers.

 

[gembeldolar]

@ansem Yes seriously I feel like the savings are honestly not that significant for us. I ask him why are we breaking our backs when we could be enjoying life more. We’re not 20 something’s anymore!