Finance Business News

American businesses added more jobs in the last three months than originally estimated, calming fears of a double-dip recession. Yet the pace of growth signaled that the wheels of the economic recovery were still spinning in place.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

The private sector added 67,000 jobs in August, with some of the strongest gains in health care, food service and temporary help, according to the Labor Department. That was higher than consensus forecasts, and the government upwardly revised its numbers for June and July, suggesting that job creation was slightly stronger over the summer than originally reported.

But the continuing wind-down of the 2010 Census, as well as state and local government layoffs, led to an overall loss of 54,000 jobs in August.

With businesses adding about half the number of positions needed simply to accommodate population growth — much less dent the ranks of the jobless — the unemployment rate ticked up to 9.6 percent, from 9.5 percent.

“The overall picture is one where the labor market is still kind of treading water,” said Joshua Shapiro, chief United States economist at MFR Inc. “It’s better than sinking, but it’s certainly not surging ahead.”

The August numbers, which pushed up stock gauges on Friday, are likely to do little to assuage political pressure on the Obama administration in the run-up to the midterm elections.

Speaking from the White House Rose Garden on Friday morning, Mr. Obama called the latest jobs report “positive news,” but said he would be unveiling “a broader package of ideas next week” to shore up the flagging economy, although he declined to give specifics. The president once again urged Congress to pass a stalled bill that would offer tax breaks to small businesses and create a $30 billion program to encourage community banks to lend.

“There’s no quick fix for this recession,” he said. “The hard truth is that it took years to create our current economic problems, and it will take more time than any of us would like to repair the damage.”

Optimists were taking their good news where they could. By the end of the day, the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index was up 1.32 percent, continuing a rally that began in the middle of the week. Market reaction to the jobs data on Friday was tempered somewhat by a report that said growth in the services sector had slowed in August.

“I can say with greater confidence that a relapse into recession now looks even more unlikely,” said Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist at the Economic Outlook Group. “And the momentum is gradually building for a stronger fourth quarter and a better 2011.”

The Labor Department revised upward its private sector number for July, raising the number of jobs added to 107,000, from the 71,000 originally reported. And private sector hiring in June, originally reported at 83,000 and lowered to 31,000, was raised again to 61,000.

Mr. Baumohl, who also noted that consumer confidence had edged up in recent surveys and that a closely watched index of manufacturing showed earlier this week that employment was increasing, pointed to the fact that the jobs report showed that average weekly earnings rose slightly, to $774.97 in August from $772.92 in July.

The average workweek among private workers was unchanged at 34.2 hours, but among production and nonsupervisory employees, it edged up to 33.5 hours, from 33.4. Economists generally see such increases in pay and workweeks as an indicator that companies are pushing their existing workers harder to meet rising demand, moves that tend to presage hiring.

According to the government, manufacturing, which has been a bright spot since the beginning of the year and remains so in some other measures, showed a surprise setback in the government numbers released Friday.

For the first time since January, the sector lost jobs, a total of 27,000 in August. The Labor Department said the decline was in part attributable to the fact that carmakers did not shut down plants in July as they usually do, throwing off seasonal adjustments in August.

Thomas J. Duesterberg, the president of the Manufacturers Alliance-MAPI, said that the organization’s members were slowly adding workers. “It’s not the type of robust growth that we would all like to see and would need to see if we’re ever going to get back to the levels that we had before the recession,” Mr. Duesterberg said, “but nonetheless it’s growth.”

Robert Ambrosi sweeps into the restaurant kitchen, past sizzling chicken and buttery mashed potatoes, and goes straight for the knives — carving knives and chef’s knives, paring knives and fillet knives, all made dull by clashes with flesh and bone. He picks them up and replaces them with identical twins.

Michael Falco for The New York Times

Robert Ambrosi working an old meat cleaver on the shop buffer/polisher. More Photos »

“Any other knives here?” calls Mr. Ambrosi, a 54-year-old scion of a knife-sharpening clan that has spread from a valley in northern Italy to grindstones in cities across North America.

Mr. Ambrosi runs Ambrosi Cutlery with his two sons, Mark, 29, and Jason, 26. Their system is typical of their trade: they rent double sets of knives to meatpackers, butchers, deli workers, restaurant cooks and chefs so that one set is always in use while the other is in the shop being sharpened.

Every week, the company visits more than 800 clients and collects more than 8,000 knives to be replaced with freshly sharpened blades. The service costs $2.50 to $3.50 per knife.

The business started servicing mainly butchers and meatpackers, in territories handed down from father to son. To preserve the business for his children, Mr. Ambrosi expanded it to restaurants and even Yankee Stadium, in some cases deviating from long-held tradition. Many cooks and chefs take personal pride in their knives and their ability to maintain them, and would hesitate to release them to anyone else’s care. But sharpening a knife takes time and skill — and not every chef has both.

A badly sharpened blade “goes flat, and you can never bring the edge back,” said Steven Santoro, the head chef at Fresco by Scotto in Midtown, who uses Ambrosi’s services. Cooks with dull knives will cut themselves, “and it takes twice as long to finish the work.”

Professionals who appreciate Ambrosi’s technique, like Stefan Bahr, the executive chef of Métrazur, in Grand Central Terminal, will even pay out of their own pockets for Ambrosi to sharpen their personal knives. (In Bahr’s case, he is trusting Ambrosi’s with knives that cost $40 to $300.)

At the Meat Hook, a butcher shop in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Mr. Ambrosi’s son Jason dropped off 13 newly sharpened knives, including an ebony-handled one with a carbon-steel blade and hand-hammered brass star-shaped rivets, produced decades ago by his great-grandfather’s company in upstate New York.

“Those are beautiful knives,” said Tom Mylan, a butcher, who is so enamored of them he has photographed the vintage one for his Facebook page.

It would be hard to find someone more concerned with the beauty of a blade than Mr. Ambrosi, whose hands show a fine crosshatch of cuts on top of old blisters and burns.

A good knife sharpener knows “how to feel it with your fingers, how to see it,” he said. It’s a craft requiring special training, he said, and even then, “some people just don’t have it.”

Most of those who do have it trace their roots to the mountains of northern Italy. Mr. Ambrosi’s grandfather, who came to the United States in the 1920s, hailed from the poor village of Carisolo. The village, with two neighboring towns of Pinzolo and Giustino, produced many of the more than 100 commercial knife sharpeners at work today in North America, sharpeners said.

No one knows why so many of the children of these towns became sharpeners. Most learned the trade in the immigrant networks of the countries where they landed. But today in Pinzolo is a tribute, Monumento al Moleta, Monument to the Knife Sharpener.

At first the immigrants came mainly to New York, but soon their offspring scattered to stake out new routes, a dozen sharpeners across the country said in interviews. Ambrosis with grindstones do business in Connecticut, New Jersey and Ohio, as well as boroughs of New York. The Binellis set up knife-sharpening businesses in Detroit, Chicago and Medford, Mass.; the Maganzinis ended up in and around Boston. The Povinellis set up shop in Buffalo and ventured to North and South Carolina and Arizona; offshoots of the Nella family went to Toronto and Vancouver, as well as Long Island, Seattle and West Jordan, Utah.

Robert Ambrosi’s grandfather traveled the Bronx in a horse-drawn cart with a grindstone powered by a foot pedal, serving, like the other knife sharpeners, mainly butchers and meatpackers.

Mr. Ambrosi’s father used a grindstone fueled by a battery carried in a truck. The battery had to be plugged in each night in the garage to recharge. Then in the 1950s came the great innovation — double sets of knives — that eventually freed the Ambrosis to set up their first shop.

American businesses added more jobs in the last three months than originally estimated, but the wheels of the economic recovery are still spinning in place.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

The private sector added 67,000 jobs in August, according to the Labor Department. That was higher than consensus forecasts, and the government upwardly revised its numbers for June and July, suggesting that job creation was slightly stronger over the summer than originally reported.

But the continuing wind-down of the 2010 Census, as well as state and local government layoffs, led to an overall loss of 54,000 jobs in August.

With businesses adding about half the number of positions needed simply to accommodate population growth — much less dent the ranks of the jobless — the unemployment rate ticked up to 9.6 percent, from 9.5 percent.

“The overall picture is one where the labor market is still kind of treading water,” said Joshua Shapiro, chief United States economist at MFR Inc. “It’s better than sinking, but it’s certainly not surging ahead.”

Given the continuing addition of private jobs, albeit at a tepid pace, Friday’s monthly snapshot of the labor market seemed to calm fears of a double-dip recession. But the numbers are likely to do little to assuage political pressure on the Obama administration in the run-up to the midterm elections.

Speaking from the White House Rose Garden on Friday morning, Mr. Obama called the latest job report “positive news,” but said he would be unveiling “a broader package of ideas next week,” to shore up the flagging economy, although he declined to give specifics. The president once again urged Congress to pass a stalled bill that would offer tax breaks to small businesses and create a $30 billion program to encourage community banks to lend.

“There’s no quick fix for this recession,” he said. “The hard truth is that it took years to create our current economic problems, and it will take more time than any of us would like to repair the damage.”

Responding to the higher-than-expected private sector numbers and revisions, investors pushed up the major stock gauges. By early afternoon, the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index was up 1 percent. Market reaction to the jobs data was tempered somewhat by a report that said growth in the services sector had slowed in August.

The Labor Department revised its private sector number for July, raising the number of jobs added to 107,000, from the 71,000 originally reported. And private sector hiring in June, originally reported at 83,000 and lowered to 31,000, was raised again to 61,000.

Optimists were taking their good news where they could. “I can say with greater confidence that a relapse into recession now looks even more unlikely,” said Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist at the Economic Outlook Group. “And the momentum is gradually building for a stronger fourth quarter and a better 2011.”

Mr. Baumohl, who also noted that consumer confidence had edged up in recent surveys and that a closely watched index of manufacturing showed earlier this week that employment was increasing, pointed to the fact that the jobs report showed that average weekly earnings rose slightly, to $774.97 in August from $772.92 in July. The average workweek among private workers was unchanged at 34.2 hours, but among production and nonsupervisory employees, it edged up to 33.5 hours, from 33.4. Economists generally see such increases in pay and workweeks as an indicator that companies are pushing their existing workers harder to meet rising demand, moves that tend to presage hiring.

According to the government, manufacturing, which has been a bright spot since the beginning of the year, showed a surprise setback. For the first time since January, the sector lost jobs, a total of 27,000 in August. The Labor Department said the decline was in part attributable to the fact that carmakers did not shut down plants in July as they usually do, throwing off seasonal adjustments in August.

Thomas J. Duesterberg, the president of the Manufacturers Alliance-MAPI, said that the organization’s members were slowly adding workers. “It’s not the type of robust growth that we would all like to see and would need to see if we’re ever going to get back to the levels that we had before the recession,” Mr. Duesterberg said, “but nonetheless it’s growth.”

Slow growth is certainly cold comfort to those who are out of work and seeking a job, a number that rose to 14.9 million in August, from 14.6 million in July. In one small sign of improvement, the number of people out of work for 27 weeks — which grew alarmingly throughout the recession and its aftermath — declined by 323,000, to 6.2 million in August from 6.6 million in July. The median length of unemployment fell to 19.9 weeks in August, from 22.2 weeks in July.

The so-called underemployment rate — which includes people whose hours have been cut as well as those who would like work but have given up on the search out of discouragement, rose to 16.7 percent in August, compared with 16.5 percent in July. The number of people who were working part time because they could not find full-time work rose to 8.9 million in August, from 8.5 million in July.

Some struggling with unemployment say they will settle for any work, even with pay cuts.

Susan Howard, a Leander, Tex., single mother with a master’s degree, said she was laid off from her software-on-demand job in June and since then has been interviewing for jobs that would pay half her previous salary.

But with only $406 a week in benefits and some child support, she has stopped paying her mortgage, deferred her car payments, reached out to a ministry for help with utility bills and enrolled her son in a reduced-cost school lunch program.

“My résumé is posted on every career résumé site there is,” she said. “I have been called in for three interviews, but none of them have ever gotten back to me.”

There is unlikely to be much relief in the coming months. Most economists are forecasting lukewarm growth in the second half. Growth in the second quarter was revised down last week, to 1.6 percent from 2.4 percent.

Jan Hatzius, chief United States economist for Goldman Sachs, said he believed the economy would grow at about 1.5 percent in the second half. That is not nearly enough to start bringing down unemployment in a significant way. “Over all you generally need 3 percent G.D.P. growth or more to start making a dent in the unemployment rate on a consistent basis,” said Mr. Hatzius, referring to gross domestic product.

He noted that Friday’s report might end up being something of a Catch-22 for government action, particularly from the Federal Reserve. Last week, the Fed chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, said the central bank was prepared to act if the economy continued to weaken, but Mr. Hatzius said Friday’s labor market numbers might cause the Fed to hold its powder.

“If you had a really bad report, that would spur people into action more,” Mr. Hatzius said. “But this is going to reduce the need for immediate action.”

Nobody likes unpleasant surprises, but when Allison Brooke Eastman’s fiancé found out four months ago just how high her student loan debt was, he had a particularly strong reaction: he broke off the engagement within three days.

Your Money

Ron Lieber writes the Your Money column, which appears in The Times on Saturdays.

Ron Lieber’s Columns »

Bucks

Who is responsible for student loan debt in a marriage? Share your thoughts.

• Post a Comment

Tami Chappell for The New York Times

Ms. Tidwell will probably rack up $250,000 in debt by the time she is done with school.

Ms. Eastman said she had told him early on in their relationship that she had over $100,000 of debt. But, she said, even she didn’t know what the true balance was; like a car buyer who focuses on only the monthly payment, she wrote 12 checks a year for about $1,100 each, the minimum possible. She didn’t focus on the bottom line, she said, because it was so profoundly depressing.

But as the couple got closer to their wedding day, she took out all the paperwork and it became clear that her total debt was actually about $170,000. “He accused me of lying,” said Ms. Eastman, 31, a San Francisco X-ray technician and part-time photographer who had run up much of the balance studying for a bachelor’s degree in photography. “But if I was lying, I was lying to myself, not to him. I didn’t really want to know the full amount.”

At a time when even people with no graduate degrees, like Ms. Eastman, often end up six figures in the hole and people getting married for the second time have loads of debt from their earlier lives, it should come as no surprise that debt can bust up engagements. Even when couples disclose their debt in detail, it poses a series of challenges.

When, exactly, are you supposed to reveal a debt of this size during the courtship? Earlier than you’d disclose, say, a chronic illness?

Even if disclosure doesn’t render you unmarriageable, tricky questions linger. If one person brings a huge debt to a relationship, who is ultimately responsible for making good on the obligation? And if it’s $170,000, isn’t the more solvent partner going to resent that debt over time no matter how early the disclosure comes? After all, it will profoundly affect every financial decision, from buying a home to how many children to have.

These were the questions that weighed on Kerrie Tidwell. A third-year student at the Medical College of Georgia and an aspiring emergency room doctor, she doesn’t worry so much about her ability to pay back her loans.

Ms. Tidwell, 26, is involved in a serious relationship with Stefan Kogler, an architect who is a native of Austria and living in Vienna. To Europeans, who often pay little or nothing toward their university studies, the idea of going deeply into debt to get educated is, well, foreign.

Ms. Tidwell feels no guilt about the $250,000 in debt she will probably run up, including some from a master’s degree program she completed in London, where she and Mr. Kogler met. “I didn’t acquire it because I go out and shop a lot,” she said. “It’s because I’m doing something that I’ll love for the rest of my life.”

Still, if she and Mr. Kogler are going to move in together and get engaged, she wants their financial arrangements to be clear and fair. But how do you define fair when you’re bringing a quarter of a million dollars in debt to a relationship?

Mr. Kogler, 30, said he’s not so worried about it. “In the long run, it will equal out,” he said. “In the short run, you have to support each other, and I will support her as much as I can.”

His stoicism is admirable. It’s all the more so, given that if he moves to the United States permanently, he’ll probably lose the chance to run his family’s business in Austria. Supporting Ms. Tidwell as she begins to pay back her loans also means he doesn’t have the freedom to, say, make a career change that involves a big pay cut. “I know he has his own dreams, and they will require money,” Ms. Tidwell said. “Will my debt take away from that?”

Lisa J. B. Peterson, a financial planner with Lantern Financial in Boston, specializes in counseling young couples and has heard this story before. About half the people she sees are both bringing significant debt to the relationship, and about a quarter of the others have one person who has a pile of student loans.

When I told her about Ms. Tidwell and Mr. Kogler, one of her first suggestions was for them to make sure that Mr. Kogler did not have to make all the compromises when they prepared a joint household budget. “They can make some kind of sacrifice so that a goal of his is achieved, too,” she said.

Then there’s the question of how to plan for the unknowns. “What would happen if I got hurt and couldn’t practice or got sued for malpractice?” Ms. Tidwell asked.

While insurance (which is itself expensive, alas) can reduce this anxiety, it can’t cover the desire to stay home with children. Ms. Tidwell is resolute about having children and working full time, but Sheila G. Riesel, a matrimonial lawyer and partner with Blank Rome in Manhattan, said Ms. Tidwell ought to consider potential extreme circumstances as well. “It could happen that she wants to be a stay-at-home spouse for a while. What if she has triplets?” Ms. Riesel asked. “All of this is worthy of discussion.”

Nobody likes unpleasant surprises, but when Allison Brooke Eastman’s fiancé found out four months ago just how high her student loan debt was, he had a particularly strong reaction: he broke off the engagement within three days.

Your Money

Ron Lieber writes the Your Money column, which appears in The Times on Saturdays.

Ron Lieber’s Columns »

Bucks

Who is responsible for student loan debt in a marriage? Share your thoughts.

• Post a Comment

Tami Chappell for The New York Times

Ms. Tidwell will probably rack up $250,000 in debt by the time she is done with school.

Ms. Eastman said she had told him early on in their relationship that she had over $100,000 of debt. But, she said, even she didn’t know what the true balance was; like a car buyer who focuses on only the monthly payment, she wrote 12 checks a year for about $1,100 each, the minimum possible. She didn’t focus on the bottom line, she said, because it was so profoundly depressing.

But as the couple got closer to their wedding day, she took out all the paperwork and it became clear that her total debt was actually about $170,000. “He accused me of lying,” said Ms. Eastman, 31, a San Francisco X-ray technician and part-time photographer who had run up much of the balance studying for a bachelor’s degree in photography. “But if I was lying, I was lying to myself, not to him. I didn’t really want to know the full amount.”

At a time when even people with no graduate degrees, like Ms. Eastman, often end up six figures in the hole and people getting married for the second time have loads of debt from their earlier lives, it should come as no surprise that debt can bust up engagements. Even when couples disclose their debt in detail, it poses a series of challenges.

When, exactly, are you supposed to reveal a debt of this size during the courtship? Earlier than you’d disclose, say, a chronic illness?

Even if disclosure doesn’t render you unmarriageable, tricky questions linger. If one person brings a huge debt to a relationship, who is ultimately responsible for making good on the obligation? And if it’s $170,000, isn’t the more solvent partner going to resent that debt over time no matter how early the disclosure comes? After all, it will profoundly affect every financial decision, from buying a home to how many children to have.

These were the questions that weighed on Kerrie Tidwell. A third-year student at the Medical College of Georgia and an aspiring emergency room doctor, she doesn’t worry so much about her ability to pay back her loans.

Ms. Tidwell, 26, is involved in a serious relationship with Stefan Kogler, an architect who is a native of Austria and living in Vienna. To Europeans, who often pay little or nothing toward their university studies, the idea of going deeply into debt to get educated is, well, foreign.

Ms. Tidwell feels no guilt about the $250,000 in debt she will probably run up, including some from a master’s degree program she completed in London, where she and Mr. Kogler met. “I didn’t acquire it because I go out and shop a lot,” she said. “It’s because I’m doing something that I’ll love for the rest of my life.”

Still, if she and Mr. Kogler are going to move in together and get engaged, she wants their financial arrangements to be clear and fair. But how do you define fair when you’re bringing a quarter of a million dollars in debt to a relationship?

Mr. Kogler, 30, said he’s not so worried about it. “In the long run, it will equal out,” he said. “In the short run, you have to support each other, and I will support her as much as I can.”

His stoicism is admirable. It’s all the more so, given that if he moves to the United States permanently, he’ll probably lose the chance to run his family’s business in Austria. Supporting Ms. Tidwell as she begins to pay back her loans also means he doesn’t have the freedom to, say, make a career change that involves a big pay cut. “I know he has his own dreams, and they will require money,” Ms. Tidwell said. “Will my debt take away from that?”

Lisa J. B. Peterson, a financial planner with Lantern Financial in Boston, specializes in counseling young couples and has heard this story before. About half the people she sees are both bringing significant debt to the relationship, and about a quarter of the others have one person who has a pile of student loans.

When I told her about Ms. Tidwell and Mr. Kogler, one of her first suggestions was for them to make sure that Mr. Kogler did not have to make all the compromises when they prepared a joint household budget. “They can make some kind of sacrifice so that a goal of his is achieved, too,” she said.

Then there’s the question of how to plan for the unknowns. “What would happen if I got hurt and couldn’t practice or got sued for malpractice?” Ms. Tidwell asked.

While insurance (which is itself expensive, alas) can reduce this anxiety, it can’t cover the desire to stay home with children. Ms. Tidwell is resolute about having children and working full time, but Sheila G. Riesel, a matrimonial lawyer and partner with Blank Rome in Manhattan, said Ms. Tidwell ought to consider potential extreme circumstances as well. “It could happen that she wants to be a stay-at-home spouse for a while. What if she has triplets?” Ms. Riesel asked. “All of this is worthy of discussion.”

Nobody likes unpleasant surprises, but when Allison Brooke Eastman’s fiancé found out four months ago just how high her student loan debt was, he had a particularly strong reaction: he broke off the engagement within three days.

Your Money

Ron Lieber writes the Your Money column, which appears in The Times on Saturdays.

Ron Lieber’s Columns »

Bucks

Who is responsible for student loan debt in a marriage? Share your thoughts.

• Post a Comment

Tami Chappell for The New York Times

Ms. Tidwell will probably rack up $250,000 in debt by the time she is done with school.

Ms. Eastman said she had told him early on in their relationship that she had over $100,000 of debt. But, she said, even she didn’t know what the true balance was; like a car buyer who focuses on only the monthly payment, she wrote 12 checks a year for about $1,100 each, the minimum possible. She didn’t focus on the bottom line, she said, because it was so profoundly depressing.

But as the couple got closer to their wedding day, she took out all the paperwork and it became clear that her total debt was actually about $170,000. “He accused me of lying,” said Ms. Eastman, 31, a San Francisco X-ray technician and part-time photographer who had run up much of the balance studying for a bachelor’s degree in photography. “But if I was lying, I was lying to myself, not to him. I didn’t really want to know the full amount.”

At a time when even people with no graduate degrees, like Ms. Eastman, often end up six figures in the hole and people getting married for the second time have loads of debt from their earlier lives, it should come as no surprise that debt can bust up engagements. Even when couples disclose their debt in detail, it poses a series of challenges.

When, exactly, are you supposed to reveal a debt of this size during the courtship? Earlier than you’d disclose, say, a chronic illness?

Even if disclosure doesn’t render you unmarriageable, tricky questions linger. If one person brings a huge debt to a relationship, who is ultimately responsible for making good on the obligation? And if it’s $170,000, isn’t the more solvent partner going to resent that debt over time no matter how early the disclosure comes? After all, it will profoundly affect every financial decision, from buying a home to how many children to have.

These were the questions that weighed on Kerrie Tidwell. A third-year student at the Medical College of Georgia and an aspiring emergency room doctor, she doesn’t worry so much about her ability to pay back her loans.

Ms. Tidwell, 26, is involved in a serious relationship with Stefan Kogler, an architect who is a native of Austria and living in Vienna. To Europeans, who often pay little or nothing toward their university studies, the idea of going deeply into debt to get educated is, well, foreign.

Ms. Tidwell feels no guilt about the $250,000 in debt she will probably run up, including some from a master’s degree program she completed in London, where she and Mr. Kogler met. “I didn’t acquire it because I go out and shop a lot,” she said. “It’s because I’m doing something that I’ll love for the rest of my life.”

Still, if she and Mr. Kogler are going to move in together and get engaged, she wants their financial arrangements to be clear and fair. But how do you define fair when you’re bringing a quarter of a million dollars in debt to a relationship?

Mr. Kogler, 30, said he’s not so worried about it. “In the long run, it will equal out,” he said. “In the short run, you have to support each other, and I will support her as much as I can.”

His stoicism is admirable. It’s all the more so, given that if he moves to the United States permanently, he’ll probably lose the chance to run his family’s business in Austria. Supporting Ms. Tidwell as she begins to pay back her loans also means he doesn’t have the freedom to, say, make a career change that involves a big pay cut. “I know he has his own dreams, and they will require money,” Ms. Tidwell said. “Will my debt take away from that?”

Lisa J. B. Peterson, a financial planner with Lantern Financial in Boston, specializes in counseling young couples and has heard this story before. About half the people she sees are both bringing significant debt to the relationship, and about a quarter of the others have one person who has a pile of student loans.

When I told her about Ms. Tidwell and Mr. Kogler, one of her first suggestions was for them to make sure that Mr. Kogler did not have to make all the compromises when they prepared a joint household budget. “They can make some kind of sacrifice so that a goal of his is achieved, too,” she said.

Then there’s the question of how to plan for the unknowns. “What would happen if I got hurt and couldn’t practice or got sued for malpractice?” Ms. Tidwell asked.

While insurance (which is itself expensive, alas) can reduce this anxiety, it can’t cover the desire to stay home with children. Ms. Tidwell is resolute about having children and working full time, but Sheila G. Riesel, a matrimonial lawyer and partner with Blank Rome in Manhattan, said Ms. Tidwell ought to consider potential extreme circumstances as well. “It could happen that she wants to be a stay-at-home spouse for a while. What if she has triplets?” Ms. Riesel asked. “All of this is worthy of discussion.”