IF you ask married people why their marriage works, they are probably not going to say it’s because they found their financial soul mate.
But if they are lucky, they have. Marrying a person who shares your attitudes about money might just be the smartest financial decision you will ever make. In fact, when it comes to finances, your marriage is likely to be your most valuable asset ”” or your largest liability.
Marrying for love is a relatively recent phenomenon. For centuries, marriages were arranged affairs, aligning families for economic or political purposes or simply pooling the resources of those scraping by.
Today, while most of us marry for romantic reasons, marriage at its core is still a financial union. So much of what we want ”” or don’t want ”” out of life boils down to dollars and cents, whether it’s how hard we choose to work, how much we consume or how much we save. For some people, it’s working 80-hour weeks to finance a third home and country club membership; for others, it means cutting back on office hours to spend more time with the family.
“A lot of the debates people have about money are code for how we want to live our lives,” said Betsey Stevenson, assistant professor of business and public policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, who researches the economics of marriage and divorce. “A lot of the choices we make in how we want to live our lives involve how we spend our money.”
Thank you for posting this, Kendall.
I’ve heard that one of the greatest indicators of a successful marriage is not that the couple be from the same culture or even the same religion, but that they come from the same socio-economic status. According to this study, a middle-class Chinese woman and a middle-class American man will have a greater chance of having a lasting marriage than an upper-middle-class American woman and a poor American man.
That beind said, as the article stated, money, ultimately, merely rifies the goals that we have as human beings, and it is the common goals that we share that will determine the success of a marriage. It would be hard for a marriage to last if one spouse is family-oriented and the other is a happy-go-lucky, party-every-minute type.