How much poorer is the math. Poorer and home with your kids, with time to use the bad laundry detergent, the hard to cook ingredients, the time to change your own tires, learn new skills, that is just simply different than poorer while working overtime, missing baseball games and paying somebody else to watch your kids because you, or both* of you, are gone. That's not math, that's qualitative. Thriving, or not. Destitute steals your time, too. Are we talking destitute?
*lucky you, singles don't make it work in these situations nearly as well, and that'd be math again.