IF you ask married people why their marriage works, they are probably not going to say it\u2019s because they found their financial soul mate.<\/p>\n
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 \u201d\u201d or your largest liability.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Today, while most of us marry for romantic reasons, marriage at its core is still a financial union. So much of what we want \u201d\u201d or don\u2019t want \u201d\u201d out of life boils down to dollars and cents, whether it\u2019s how hard we choose to work, how much we consume or how much we save. For some people, it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of the debates people have about money are code for how we want to live our lives,\u201d\u009d said Betsey Stevenson, assistant professor of business and public policy at the University of Pennsylvania\u2019s Wharton School, who researches the economics of marriage and divorce. \u201cA lot of the choices we make in how we want to live our lives involve how we spend our money.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n