I told DH to quite his job when it was getting too stressful AND his commute sucked. Life is too short to live this way if you can help it. HOWEVER, if he decreases his stress level at work, then he needs to help more at home. When you have kids, life is fairly stressful. You can't get away from that.

Anonymous wrote:I’m trying to be sympathetic but I know six months from now, we are going to be in the exact same situation. That’s where we were six months ago. He hated his last job, said he needed to move on. Took a pay cut for this current job which he now wants to quit. If he leaves, it’s not going to be easy for him to get back into a job like he’s had. Then he’s really going to be stuck because there aren’t ample jobs in his field outside of working for the county. We have one car payment, we can cut our food budget but truly, there’s no where else to find money. We own our home and have a very reasonable mortgage payment, don’t take vacations. We have childcare expenses but those are fixed too. We have young children and if we are both working, we need childcare. So yes, we already live on a budget. We don’t live extravagant at all. I can see us cutting out maybe $5k a year but that doesn’t make up the rest.

This was OPs update. They’ve already cut everything they could when the husband took his first paycut last year. He’s putting all the financial stress of his decisions on her and taking no responsibility for his situation. On top of everything, she still has to listen complain all day because he doesn’t want to deal with his anxiety.

OP, you should divorce him while he still has a job. People who refuse to treat mental health issues will drag you underwater with them. You’re both going to drown if you don’t get away from him.

Anonymous wrote:He is more than a meal ticket. He is your husband. Have a heart...

I wonder if he feels the same way about her?

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Anonymous wrote:I’m definitely not a SAHM. I also make more than my husband. I’ve been asking him to see a counselor forever but he’s always so busy with work, he says he doesn’t have the time. He reminds me how little we have when I buy a coffee work or want to sign our kids up for a sport (currently only one is doing one sport). He’s going from $80ks to $60ks.

Have you run the numbers with him? That much of a change will be a significant decrease in your monthly cash flow. It could be $1,000 to $1,200 a month less cash or more. Can you guys afford that?

Note that they’re already feeling the pressure from him quitting his 100K job for the current 80K position. Hence he gets mad at her if she ever buys a cup of coffee. This is not going to end well...

OP wants money, money, more money...

Mmm. It sounds like OP doesn’t want to have every $3 purchase micromanaged because the husband doesn’t want to work...

The coffee poster wasn't the OP, it was a different poster who had been in a similar situation. I would be worried about a dynamic where DH works for a lower and lower salary AND doesn't pick up any slack at home. I had a depressed and unemployed spouse who did NOTHING for 9 months. That situation set up a bad dynamic for us where I was killing myself at work and taking on side gigs for extra $ and doing almost everything at home. My resentment and my spouse's passivity were relationship killers. We divorced and my ex stepped up, has tripled their salary and is the sole bread winner to an unemployed GF. Not sure what the moral of that story is except that I wish we had both addressed our underlying mental health issues instead of just stewing in dysfunction for years.

I'm the poster who says that the jump will mean $1,000 to 1,200 less a month and I agree with the last 2 PPs. If OP's income is above, say, $250k then the difference of $20k won't make much a difference; however, that seems unlikely given OPs posts. The closer you are to the margin the more significant a loss of income becomes. Just think of what you can do with $1,000: it is 2 or 3 car payments plus car operating costs plus insurance, it is the cost of all the household utilities plus insurance plus part of the monthly food expense, it is 2 or 3 weeks of childcare, it is half or a third of a mortgage payment, … The loss of that real cash money will be a huge stressor.

People seem to equate a higher salary with greater stress, and vice versa; however, there is not an incontrovertible correlation. IMO the receptionist at my husband's office experiences WAAAAAY more day-to-day stress than any of the executives she works for, and she earns far less. Additionally, in education there does seem to be an inverse relationship between salary and stress; those of us at the bottom of the pay pyramid where I work, the teachers/paras/aides, are much more stressed than the APs/Principal/other administrators, and all of us are significantly more stressed out than the good folks who are executives working in the school system's administrative offices.

I also agree with other PPs that it sounds like the husband has some underlying depression or mental health issues that need to be addressed. It sounds greatly unfair to me to put all the additional stress to recover the $20k on OP if DH makes the choice he wants to make, especially since there is no proof that the lower paid job will result in less stress. He needs to address the elephant in the room before he does anything else.