'I feel shame': She makes 2X her husband's salary and is saving for retirement alone. He has $16K. Ramit Sethi says 'work harder' isn't the answer

“I feel shame,” Andre told Ramit Sethi on his podcast, I Will Teach You to be Rich. “I know that most of the money that is there, it comes from her. I don’t feel that I’m contributing enough.”

Maria earns $126,000 a year, while Andre earns $61,000 — roughly half her salary — working as an HVAC technician while studying for his license. She’s planning to retire in eight years, when she’s 61. If nothing changes, though, one question has been tormenting her, which she raised with Sethi directly: “Am I going to spend all of that time alone?”

‘Work harder’ doesn’t solve the problem — it’s about teamwork

It would be easy to frame this as a simple income problem. But Sethi pushed back on that framing explicitly.

When Maria described wanting Andre to “make more money” and “have a plan,” Sethi noted that those two things were in tension: if Andre has to make more, he probably has to work more — but he’s already working six days a week and coming home physically exhausted from jobs like crawling under houses to replace ducts in 11-inch clearances.

“He can’t work anymore than he is,” Maria acknowledged.

The deeper issue, Sethi argued, was that this couple — who have combined their finances and are legally married — are still operating financially as individuals rather than a team.

Maria’s fixed costs before combining were 48%; Andre’s were 85%. She was covering insurance, car expenses, trips to Brazil and savings, while the two maintained a confusing hybrid of joint and separate accounts.

That kind of financial opacity is pretty common. Fidelity’s Couples & Money Study found nearly half of couples skip financial conversations entirely to prevent arguments, and almost a quarter have hidden something money-related from their partner.

But “when you get married,” Sethi explained, “you can’t just do it your own way. You have to talk to each other. You have to compromise.”

The immigrant context matters

Andre’s situation isn’t just about personal choices. As Sethi acknowledged, building financial stability as an immigrant in the U.S. is systemically harder than it looks from the outside.

Without a green card, Andre spent years working as a subcontractor — bearing his own expenses for gas, insurance and supplies, while the company he worked for underpaid reimbursements and he had little negotiating power to push back.

“This is one of the many ways that companies screw over people who don’t have a lot of power in the labor force,” Sethi said.

Data supports the couple’s reality. According to an analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, among the bottom 80% of earners, foreign-born workers are significantly less likely than U.S.-born workers to own a defined contribution retirement account — a gap that largely disappears only among the highest earners.