Marriage pays off!

After 34 years of marriage, I have one thing to say: Marriage is not easy. Some days – some years – we survived as a couple, not so much because we clung to each other as we clung stubbornly to those vows of “for better, for worse, for sickness and health, till death do us part,”
Personally, I meant what I said, so the vows fostered reason enough. However, some busy body researcher called Jay Zagorsky from Ohio State University studied 9,055 individuals and compared the wealth of persons who were married versus the single or divorce people. He tracked their wealth and marital status from 1985 to 2000.
These individuals, now 41-49 years old, have been participating in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which has repeatedly interviewed them about various aspects of their lives since 1979. Zagorsky divided married couples’ assets so they could be compared with singles, according to the Associated Press story.
His study, published in the current issue of the ‘Journal of Sociology,’ shows that a person who marries – and stays married – accumulates nearly twice as much personal wealth as a person who is single or divorced. Zagorsky’s study defines wealth as the total value of a person’s assets, such as real estate, stocks and bank accounts, minus liabilities, such as mortgages.
“For those who divorce, it’s a bit more expensive than giving up half of everything they own. They lose, on average, three-fourths of their personal net worth,” according to the Associated Press story. Ironically, the decline in wealth attributed to divorce typically begins four years before the divorce.
“Divorce looks like one of the fastest ways to destroy your wealth,” Zagorsky concluded.
Two really can live as cheaply as one and save more money in the process. Why? Well sharing living quarters, bills and all the other accouterments of a household frees up a lot of other cash and time to use for other purposes. If you aren’t paying the rent or house payments on two places, you save not only the rent but also the utilities, furnishings, upkeep and all the other little miscellaneous items that go with having a place of your own.
But something else is happening here for individuals to be worth twice as much after sticking together. An additional impetus begins with the wedding vows and that serious commitment to be there for each other. People become more economically productive after they marry according to David Popenoe, co-director of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University.
“They work harder, they advance further in their job, they save more money and maybe invest more wisely,” Popenoe said in the AP story.
People used to actually consider their children’s sense of security as a legitimate reason for staying married, but if tugging on your heart strings won’t do it, then try this statistical tug on your purse strings. In Zagorsky’s study of accumulated wealth, single people went from a median wealth of $1,500 in 1985 to $10,900 in 2000. A married person, however, had 93 percent more per person than the single or divorced people during those same 15 years … that’s an average of $10,000 more per person.
To all those couples who sigh and say, “Oh, we can’t afford to get married,” take Zagorsky’s study and stick it in the bank. Quit fooling yourself, you can’t afford to NOT get married.
For those toying with splitting the sheets, it might be time to pay the fee for a good marriage counselor. Statistically speaking, finding a way to resolve differences pays fantastic dividends – some of them financial.