To that end, SHU and I produced an episode of Best of Both Worlds this week on interesting money questions. We ask each other what we’d do with a windfall (my boring answer is that changing day to day life is a really high bar! I suspect we’d be living very similar lives…while sitting on a nicer sofa). We talk about money mistakes we have made. We talk about our earliest money memories.

Please give the episode a listen and we’d love to hear your answers for any of these questions as well!

In today’s episode of Best of Both Worlds, I interview Farnoosh Torabi, a financial expert, host of the So Money podcast, and author of the brand new book A Healthy State of Panic. She talks about growing up in an Iranian-American immigrant household, and how that affected her outlook on life, her own financial fears as she’s built her career, navigating being a female breadwinner, and more.

In the intro, Sarah and I talk a little about financial podcasts, and then in the Q&A we take a question from a listener who wants to know if she should hire a designer to help with decorating her new space.

Please give the episode a listen, and as always, we welcome ratings and reviews!

Also, please consider joining our Patreon community! We have had lively discussions going over there about adult ADHD, bringing partners on board with planning, good haircuts, and more. Membership is $9/month. Patreon has a “join for free” button on the top of the page, but all the content is behind a paywall, so scroll down to the $9/month level to actually join

In other news: My blog turned up this picture/post about Farnoosh and me from 2015!

For any Frugal Girl readers, I was today’s Meet the Reader post. I talk about the “why” behind saving money (freedom + security) and the wisdom of keeping base expenses low if possible. I take issue with how frugality literature often doesn’t question the decision to be a one-income family and why women need to protect their earning capacity.

Anyway, please check out the interview! In the meantime, I took my 2-year-old to the Please Touch Museum this morning. We have a membership, and they open only to members on Mondays, so it wasn’t too crowded. We had a good time but he definitely wanted to stop at the cafe, which is always a flash point for (frugal) me. My default answer on buying food out is no. I don’t want to start the habit, we bring snacks, we also have food at home…

But he was really excited about it and pointed at a popsicle in the cafe which turned out to be 90 cents. Really! Is anything under a dollar anymore? He ate every little bite and loved it and was so happy about it.

So, I guess it’s good to spend 90 cents for fun. Now let’s hope he stays asleep until camp pick up…

I have been thinking of these questions because I recently read Jennifer Barrett’s new book, Think Like a Breadwinner. (She was also a guest on the How to Money podcast this week, if people want to listen to that!)

In this book, Jennifer argues that a great many women do not grow up thinking that their personal career and money choices might determine their family’s living standards. She didn’t. She spent her younger years in fairly low-paying jobs, figuring if she was keeping up with the bills, she was OK. Then — in a dark-night-of-the-soul, middle-of-the-night crisis — she realized that she wanted to buy a home and have a second baby. Her husband, who’d experienced some recent career setbacks, wasn’t particularly poised to make that happen. Cue the angst until she discovered…oh wait. He’s not the only adult around here. She made some career moves that allowed her to earn more and create the life she wanted for her family, in the process re-examining many of the money scripts she hadn’t questioned until then.

For many women, growing up, the assumption — of what is the norm, the default — is that there will be another adult in the household who earns more. This guides all sorts of choices — of careers, of the acceptability of certain salaries, of the desirability of flexible jobs vs. ones with higher earning potential. Many men, on the other hand, grow up believing that their income, and quite possibly their income alone, could determine their family’s living standards. Sometimes this is even explicit. I know I’ve talked to a lot of young men who mention wanting to earn enough “so my wife doesn’t need to work if she doesn’t want to.” If the person is entering a job not known for high pay, he might figure out other income streams (Joel on How to Money, for instance, has talked about aiming, early on, to augment his radio business salary with rental income). I cannot recall a young woman saying that so clearly.

There is nothing wrong with the family structure where the male half of a heterosexual couple happens to out-earn the female half (I live in one such family!) The issue is that a reasonable number of families will wind up with a female breadwinner at some point, whether by circumstance or because Mom turns out to be much, much better at money-generation. When this reality bangs up against a lot of cultural conditioning, this can be jarring for all involved. I wrote, a great many years ago, about a strange “money success story” of a family accepting a reduced standard of living because they found it so critical that Dad be the breadwinner.

In any case, Jennifer encourages women to develop more of a breadwinner mindset — taking your income growth, wealth building, and career development seriously as a way to serve your family. While I found parts of the book meandering, I did appreciate that this is a not-so-common message. A lot of personal finance literature aimed at women is about cutting back (so you can work less and live on your husband’s income) or about saving up for that pair of shoes or a girl’s get-away. Some of the advanced stuff talks about saving for retirement in your company’s 401k. It’s rarely about increasing your income potential and wealth building with the goal of giving your family the life you want long before retirement.

What money stories did you grow up with? If you are female, how much weight did you give income, and the need to support a family, when thinking about career possibilities?