“We’d love to support you financially, but my husband is just an engineer.”
Sometimes these posts just write themselves.
Unemployed? That’s a good reason not to give. Engineer? Some people go into engineering solely for the money. If you had said “freelance harmonica player,” it would have set my mental payscale in the proper range to set off some not-big-giver alarms.
Wait, what type of engineer? The cheapest pay rate I could find online for a job that says “engineer” after it is around 50,000 per year. Some of those folks make it up into the 6-digit range, though. So perhaps you should specify, you know, since you gave that as a justification for why not to give. He’s just an engineer. If he’s a Level 5 Petroleum Drilling engineer, he’s likely pulling in a ton of money these days, unless he used to work for BP.
It’s gonna be easier to connect with me if you stick to actual reasons why you can’t give, like the fact that you just don’t want to.
Here are some other professions you should avoid using to complete the sentence “We’d love to give, but my husband is just _________”
A surgeon
Unless he’s a veterinary surgeon with a specialty in hamster knee replacement surgery, I’m pretty sure we’d have a different definition of “small paycheck”
A pharmaceutical sales rep
A friend of mine went into pharmaceutical sales, and they gave her a car. A nice car. They pay for meals, put her up in nice hotels, give her hour-long backrubs, wrap her paycheck in wrapping paper made from $100 bills, and automatically contribute money to her 401-K every three minutes. Maybe I made some of that up, but the bottom line is that if your job comes with an expense account, you and I are speaking a different language if you use that job as a reason why you can’t give.
A banker
I know that not all bankers make ridiculous money, but the fact that you work all day around money makes it difficult for me to fathom how you’d not be making enough to give. Don’t all bankers have a special room in their house like Scrooge McDuck that they swim around in their money?
A reality TV star
Here’s a tricky one, because some people get to be on reality TV by being broke. The show “Pawn Stars” (though I honestly have never seen it) strikes me as a show where they don’t exactly follow around Bill and Melinda Gates. Regardless, I wouldn’t recommend name-dropping the TV show you were in as a reason not to give. “Yeah, when I was hanging out with Kid Rock last week after we filmed the first episode of ‘America’s Next Top Trailer Park Landlord’ we went over my monthly budget and just didn’t see any margin in there for giving.”
A nuclear physicist
If at any point during describing your job to me, I have to wikipedia an entire branch of natural science on my iPhone, it’s going to make it tough for me to understand how you don’t make lots of money doing that job. See that glazed over look in my eyes? That’s me trying to reconcile the fact that you do things for which you need to have President Obama’s security clearance, and go places that you’d have to shoot me if you told me, yet you can’t set aside 15 bucks per month to support my ministry.
Did I miss any? Chime in in the comments with some other great jobs to fill out this list.