Elizabeth Warren offered some blunt advice to women in a financial self-help book she wrote with her daughter in 2003: Don’t have children and, if you divorce, re-marry as soon as possible.
The senator for Massachusetts and Democratic 2020 presidential candidate, 70, and Amelia Warren Tyagi, 47, shared their recommendations in The Two Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are (Still) Going Broke. In its pages, the pair teamed up to lay out their case for how double-income couples started “a bidding war” in the middle class that raised the cost of living, so that working families had to commit both their salaries to, for example, paying off a mortgage on a house in a good school district rather than saving for a rainy day.
The book, based on the White House hopeful’s extensive bankruptcy research and her businesswoman daughter’s management consulting experience, cited data that indicated having a child is “the single best predictor that a woman will end up in financial collapse,” with a divorced mother being almost “three times more likely to file for bankruptcy than her single friend who never had children.”
“Some women have found another way to avoid the Two-Income Trap. It doesn’t involve loading up on insurance policies or conducting a financial fire drill; nor does it require you to keep a spouse at home full-time. And unlike the other solutions we have presented, it is cost-free and highly effective. Their solution? Don’t have children,” they wrote.
While acknowledging childlessness may not be a calculated decision, they touted its lifelong benefits, including how it ratchets up the likelihood of “a comfortable retirement.”
“A few generations ago, advising women not to have children would have seemed ridiculous,” they wrote, alluding to the suggestion’s defiance of social norms and the argument children are “economic assets.” “Children are still economic assets. Today’s children will build the economy of tomorrow, defend the nation in future wars, care for the sick, construct new buildings, repair the roads, and support the next generation of elderly through Social Security.
“But there is a key difference: These benefits will go to society at large, not to specific parents.”
Although it would run counter to financial interests, they added: “If you feel called to be a parent, we hope you will follow your heart. Yes, you may lose your home, and you may go bankrupt. We hope the jobs will outweigh the financial pain. And besides, what other advice would you expect from two working mothers who believe in the great American middle class and who pray for its strong future.”
Warren, at the time a Harvard Law School professor and years away from seeking elected office, and Warren Tyagi, also dedicated a chapter to divorced mothers. They asserted that despite receiving better educations, better job training, better legal support, and better paychecks, the demographic was less financially secure than it was 25 years prior because it’s become more difficult “to compete in a two-income world.”
“Some women take an alternate path to survive the economic blows raining down on their families: They remarry,” they wrote. “Sure, we know that marriage — even second marriage — is supposed to be about chemistry and companionship, but getting a foreclosure notice can make anyone rethink what she really needs from a relationship. Even now, a generation after the Women’s Revolution, the surest way for a woman to regain her financial footing after a divorce is to find a husband — and to do it quickly.” “In a world of economic hurt, even a guy with half a job looks good,” they continued.
Warren is herself divorced. She married her first husband, Jim Warren, in 1968. They had two children, Tyagi and Alexander Warren, 43, and split up a decade later. He died in 2003. Warren began dating her current husband, Bruce Mann, before she was divorced and married him six months after the end of her first marriage. She is now a grandmother of three.
Her interest in bankruptcy law as a Harvard Law School professor led to her being added to the National Bankruptcy Review Commission in 1995. The Wall Street critic would go on to assess the federal bank bailout as chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel from 2008 and later became pivotal to the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2010 before entering politics.
Mother and daughter followed up The Two Income Trap with All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan in 2005, a New York Times bestseller.
