“Having a child is now the single best predictor that a woman will end up in financial collapse,.” writes Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard law professor and bankruptcy expert who’s just published? The Two-Income Tax: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke.” Since 1996, the number of women filing for bankruptcy has increased 662%.
Writes Warren, “Even as millions of mothers marched into the workforce, savings declined, and not, as we will show, because families were frittering away their paychecks on toys for themselves or their children. Instead, families were swept up in a bidding war, competing furiously with one another for their most important possession: a house in a decent school district..
“The average two-income family earns far more today than did the single-breadwinner family of a generation ago. And yet, once they have paid the mortgage, the car payments, the taxes, the health insurance, and the day-care bills, today’s dual-income families have less discretionary income, and less money to put away for a rainy day than the single-income family of a generation ago.”