Only some people are wired for it. My wife is smart, hard-working, and has skills that would translate into much higher paychecks if she worked for herself. Even her hobbies could make her lots of money. I've tried numerous times to get her to start her own business, because I find entrepreneurship so fulfilling and I love the freedom and the challenges. I want to share the feeling with her and, frankly, I also want…
I find it hard to believe you were making over $480,000 a year and your wife insisted you get a second job making $10 an hour. Perhaps your calculations are off.
I understand the ridiculousness of what I'm saying. That is my f0Rking point. My wife is emotional and irrational about money, and especially so about having a CONSISTENT paycheck. [This is the same woman that actually thought briefly about declaring bankruptcy when she was younger, despite the fact that she had a large number of shares in a major bank at the time. It never entered her mind to sell the shares, because her grandfather had been president of the bank some time during the '70s, so the shares were "sentimental" and part of her "family heritage." Never mind the fact that she really needed the money, and the bank stock was starting to tank anyway.]
My wife is a wonderful, compassionate woman...so I try to overlook her big weird money issues.
She didn't specifically ask me to get a job making just $10/hr...that's just the way it worked out. She asked me to get a "low-stress" job that I could work after having worked 60-70 hours a week on my own business. It had to be a job that I was qualified to do, and that offered (backup) health insurance. Since we lived in a somewhat rural area at the time, the only option was a nightshift job at a local hotel...and I started at $7.48/hr. I ended up making ALMOST $10/hr. And it was NOT "low-stress" (I was slapped, spit on, robbed, etc. during my employment there.) The big perk while I worked there was that I could stay at almost any Hilton property in the world for just $29 a night, which helped me immensely when I was traveling for my own company. I worked that second job for exactly 4 years and 11 months. Even after I was making millions a year. And I never actually made it to a FULL $10 an hour there. I think I topped out at $9.95/hr.
The only reason I STILL don't have a second job is that I had a serious illness and could barely even work at my own company. My wife also had cancer, and she started to re-evaluate her irrational fears.