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Show 40 of Families Have More Than Single Income Look around the neighborhood, neighbor-hood, and chances are statistically, statisti-cally, at any rate that 2 out of 5 families will have more than one wage-earner. Look next year and there'll probably be more of these families. fami-lies. In the last five years, "multi-earner" "multi-earner" families have been increasing in-creasing at an average of 3 per cent annually, which is to say that in an average year there are 103 such families where there were only 100 the previous year. With more families becoming "multi-earner" families, the Institute In-stitute of Life Insurance points out, all statistics seem to indicate indi-cate that by 1970 at least half the homes in the United States will have more than one wage-earner. wage-earner. Maybe more people will be gulping their coffee in the morning but they'll bring home the bacon at night. The development of the "multi-earner" family involves women primarily, because in the typical family with a second earner, the wife is very apt to be that earner. (In other homes with more than one earner, they are usually grown children still living with their families.) Women take jobs outside the home for a multitude of reasons. The basic one, of course, is to add to family income. Often a wife works to help with a major financial goal the purchase of a home, a new car, college education edu-cation for a youngster. Many a wife has gone to work with the thought of adding to her family's funds for retirement. A woman may have other reasons rea-sons for working. A wife in her 40's, her children grown, may feel herself free now to take a job where she can put her education edu-cation to use, or once again employ em-ploy the skills she developed in her job before marriage. How much money working wives contribute to family income in-come varies widely. Three things are involved: the nature of the job, whether a wife works full-time full-time or part-time, and the extra expenses related to the job. Most women realize that with a job they will spend more for clothing, cloth-ing, cosmetics, beauty narlor services and transportation than a full-time homemaker. They may not realize the degree of the added expense of meals and household upkeep. In one Georgia Geor-gia locality checked by Department Depart-ment of Agriculture home economists, econ-omists, working wives with modest mod-est earnings reported that about half their income was consumed by all expenses related to their jobs. Nevertheless, for the nation as a whole, wives who work full-time full-time do boost their family income in-come considerably; they contribute contrib-ute 38 per cent of their families' incomes, on an average. Frequently Fre-quently it is the wife's earnings that raise her family into the middle income group. As the Department De-partment of Labor found recently, recent-ly, among families in the $7,000 to $10,000 income bracket where wives worked, they brought home, on the average, 30 per cent of the family's total spending power. A wife who works at a 30b outside her home very often comes away with more than extra income for her family and renewed re-newed job satisfactions for herself. her-self. Many working wives have employee benefits such as group life insurance and health instance, inst-ance, and group annuities. Their group life insurance represents additional family financial protection; pro-tection; their group health insurance insur-ance protects against hospital and often other medical costs; and their group annuity will add a regular income after retirement. |