Wall Street Journal
February 12, 1999
 

Getting Married Pays

By Dwight R. Lee and Richard B. McKenzie, authors of "Getting Rich in America: 8 Simple Rules for Building a Fortune and a Satisfying Life" (HarperBusiness, 1999).

Valentine's Day, as everyone knows, is a day best spent considering your financial future. For one of the most important investments you can make is in an endearing and enduring marriage, and finding a suitable partner can be as important to your financial success as working on your career.

There is plenty of evidence that married couples do better financially than single people. A National Institute of Aging survey of 12,000 people age 51 to 61 found that married couples are on average twice as wealthy as unmarried couples. Marriage obviously doesn't explain all of the financial differences between the married and unmarried: Characteristics that increase your financial potential also increase your marriage prospects. But marriage stands as an independent force for improving your wealth.

By joining together as a team, a married couple can be more productive than two people operating separately. By specializing and cooperating in household duties, they can take care of these duties more efficiently, leaving more time to devote to their careers. This translates into more income. Also, your income goes further when married. While two cannot live cheaper than one, two together can live significantly cheaper than two apart.

But the biggest financial advantage from a solid marriage is that it increases the importance of the future. Financial success requires the foresight and patience that comes from having a meaningful future, and marriage adds meaning to the future in two important ways.

First, married people tend to take better care of themselves, and to live longer, than unmarried people. They typically eat better, have more settled lives and fewer risky habits, monitor each other's health, and are quicker to seek medical attention for problems that arise. Divorced men have twice the lung cancer rate of married men, and three to four times married men's rates of genital, mouth and throat cancers. Divorced and single men also have around three times married men's rate of death from hypertensive heart disease.

Single women fare better relative to their married counterparts than do single men, but not by much. Married women have a 90% chance of living to 65, while single or divorced women have only around a 65% chance of doing so (with widowed women almost as likely to reach 65 as married women). One researcher concluded that "being divorced and a nonsmoker is slightly less dangerous than smoking a pack or more a day" -- which suggests that the marriage penalty built into the tax code undercuts not only Americans' prosperity but also their health.

Second, married people are more likely to have and invest in children. Parents have an extra measure of motivation not only to live longer, but to embrace a future that extends beyond their lifetimes. Thus it comes as no surprise that married couples tend to save more than single people, and then live longer to take advantage of their savings.

So think of an intimate Valentine message (accompanied by candy or flowers) for that special person in your life as a modest but important long-run investment in your financial future. Of course, there are also more immediate returns from Valentine's Day that should not be overlooked.