Two Households, One Income: The Divorce Nobody Budgets For

A reader wrote to Correspondence in August with a sentence I have not stopped thinking about: nobody writes about the part where two houses both need a can opener.

I am the divorced one on this masthead, and she is right. I could have told you in 2021 what a mediator cost. I could not have told you, and did not find out until the second month, that setting up a second household from nothing costs about as much as a decent used car and that most of it goes on objects nobody thinks about until the moment they are needed.

Nine households. The legal process ran a median of $4,900. The first six months of running two homes ran a median of $19,400.

The duplicate setup

$3,100, median, and every household underestimated it.

The list is mundane and relentless: a bed and bedding, a desk or a table, towels, a shower curtain, plates, pans, a colander, cutlery, a toaster, a lamp, a rubbish bin, school supplies that live at the second house, a second set of chargers, a coat that stays at Dad’s, a toothbrush, and — because the reader was right — a can opener.

Three households bought all of it in the first fortnight, which is what you do when a child is arriving on Friday and the flat is empty. They spent a median of $900 more than the households that bought it over three months, and in interviews the children of both groups were indistinguishable on the question of how quickly the second home felt like a home.

What made a second home feel like a home, according to the six children I was allowed to speak to, was having their own things in it — a drawer, a shelf, a place a thing lives — which is not a spending question at all.

The ninety-day trap

In seven of nine households, the housing decision made in the first ninety days set the custody pattern for the next three years.

Not the agreement. The housing. A parent who takes a one-bedroom because it is what they can afford in a bad month has, functionally, decided that overnight stays are on a sofa. A parent who takes something forty minutes from the school does not have weeknights, whatever any document says, because a 7:40 school run from forty minutes away is not a thing anybody sustains through a Minnesota February.

Both of those decisions get made in the worst month of a person’s life, under time pressure, usually alone.

Three households did it in the other order: they worked out the week first — who has which nights, what the handover looks like, what the school run requires — and then went looking for housing that could deliver it. All three described the search as harder and the year as easier. It is much cheaper to change a plan than to change a tenancy.

The recurring doubles

Beyond housing, the second household adds a set of small permanent costs that nobody itemises: a second set of utilities, a second internet bill, a second of every subscription that is not shareable, a second commute to the school, and — in five of nine — a second car where there had been one.

Our subscriptions piece found households underestimating their recurring spending by a median of $71 a month at the best of times. In a separating household, the recurring lines are being rebuilt from scratch by two exhausted people who are not comparing notes, and two of our nine were paying for the same streaming service twice for over a year.

The handover is the operational problem

Every household in this reporting had eventually built something that functions like the standard operating procedures this magazine publishes for intact households: a written, repeatable handover.

What goes in the bag. What comes back. Where the inhaler is. Who has the boots. The households without one described the same recurring failure — the thing that is at the wrong house on the wrong night — and described it as a source of conflict entirely out of proportion to a pair of football boots, because it is never really about the boots.

The version that worked, in four households, is one shared note that both parents can edit, listing what travels and what is duplicated on purpose. Anything on the duplicate list never travels again. It costs money once and removes an argument permanently, and every parent who did it wished they had done it in month one instead of month nine.

What I would tell somebody in month one

Decide the week before the lease. Buy the second household slowly, except for the bed. Duplicate anything that has caused two arguments. And write the handover down, because you are going to be doing it two hundred times a year and you are currently doing it from memory, in a driveway, while upset.