There is a substantial international literature demonstrating that, contrary to the claims of neoclassical economics, household monies are not entirely fungible. Specifically, the monies earned by one partner are not usually interchangeable with those earned by their partner of the other gender. Research on this topic in Egypt has documented complex financial flows between husbands and wives. This previous work is limited, however, by its focus on low-income households alone and its reliance on wives’ accounts to the exclusion of husbands’. In the current study, I use in-depth qualitative interviews with 30 husband-wife dyads across three class groups in Cairo, Egypt, to examine the household budgeting behaviors and discursive practices of dual-earning heterosexual couples I find that symbolic boundaries are constructed to differentiate between women’s and men’s incomes, giving rise to a status hierarchy of monies. While nearly all dual-earner couples in my sample aspired to a male breadwinning ideal in which the household’s needs would be covered by men’s earnings alone, few couples were able to live up to this ideal in Egypt’s high-inflation post-floatation economic landscape. I trace three discursive practices that served to not only distinguish between men’s and women’s earnings, but more importantly, to diminish the value of women’s financial contributions to the household. First, I find that both men and women downplayed women’s monetary contributions to the household and heightened the importance of men’s earnings. Respondents across all three class groups referred to women’s income-generating activities as ‘help’ or ‘supplementary’ to the husband’s breadwinning activities, and their incomes as ‘extra’ or ‘minimal.’ Second, I find that spouses engaged in gendered misrepresentations of their financial arrangements. Men claimed ignorance regarding the exact sum of money earned by their wives. I show that this claim on the part of men is patterned by class, such that working class men are more likely to know what their wives earn because they must be more mindful of the limited means they have. Third, I find that women, but more often men, routinely claimed that God's intervention rather than women's earnings explained their ability to overcome financial crises. Men similarly claimed that God’s intercession alone allowed them to maintain households in which expenditures exceeded incomes. Together, these three practices allowed men and women to neutralize the gender deviance represented by wives’ work, and to offset the threat to husbands’ masculinity represented by women’s contributions to the household budget.