Is Being Married Always a Financial Advantage?
You would think so if you watched Suze Orman’s show last week where she discussed gay marriage and the four financial advantages of being married. On her show, she mentioned that married people have all kinds of advantages in terms of health insurance, pensions, social security, and estate taxes. She says that you can leave your spouse 100% of your assets tax-free, get higher social security benefits if your spouse dies, and pension plans at corporations often let you leave money to your spouse. Employers often insure a spouse and not a life partner. Okay, fair enough but maybe that just says more about how our tax structure and employee benefits are set than about marriage. For example, your kids get screwed if you leave them your money too as part of your estate by high estate taxes. Why not change the estate law to make this more fair? But this post is about the other side that Orman did not touch on: What are the financial disadvantages of being married?
There are many. First, what about the marriage penalty? Two high earners who are married pay more than if they were single. Is this fair? Not in my book. Another disadvantage of being married is that spouses are often responsible for the other’s debt. If your spouse racks up a great deal of debt and bails on it, that can become your problem, depending on the state you live in. According to Nolo.com:
In community property states, most debts incurred by either spouse during the marriage are owed by the “community” (the couple), even if only one spouse signed the paperwork for a debt. The key here is during the marriage.
And what if you don’t want to leave your retirement account to your spouse? According to Nolo.com “your spouse–or former spouse–may have a legal claim to your retirement account, so proceed with caution.”
Finally, if you get divorced, you may end up giving most of your assets away, even if you earned them. And then, of course, there are the non-financial restrictions on you when married, especially if male. You often need your wife’s permission to get a vasectomy. Even your own body is no longer your own once you become wedded to a woman.
Can you name some more financial disadvantages of marriage that I missed?
allow me.
although our laws were set up to be dependent on equality before the law, divorces are anything but. divorce courts are set up to take from the man and give to the woman. once divorced, the woman is overwhelmingly awarded control of one’s childen, and for most, all assets accumulated during the marriage. x-wives have come back decades later to claim undeserved booty. lottery winnings, retirement funds, ss, and even inheritances can be divided up at a feminist judge’s whim. pre-nup’s can and have been invalidated for just about every reason imaginable.
on the subject of child support, can anyone think of a reason for it not to have a top end? i can. get prego by a rich guy and bleed him dry. rich guys go to jail all the time when the income falls, as it oft does through no fault of their own. can you spell debtor’s prison children?
alimony? wth is that about? men paying for the privilege of having been married? and it often has no top end or ending date. permament alimony is not rare by any means. i could go on all day with more reasons, but guys are catching on (finally), and a lot of women are doing w/o husbands these days. couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch.
I’m studying for the Series 7 General Securities Representative exam to be able to sell financial products. I learned this week that for IRA purposes, alimony is considered earned income. What precisely did she do to earn it?
She put out. Silly question…
Alimony does not imply kids. Maybe she did not put out.
To clarify:
Nothing was meant to be implied about having had kids at all. She’s a de facto prostitute and ex-hubby gets to continue paying her for past services rendered. That’s alimony in a nutshell.
Alimony and child support are two entirely separate things, and don’t get anyone here started too much on child support…
She didn’t have to do anything. He said “I do”. That is all it takes to legalize robbery now.
I think both these analyses are focusing too much on the bean-counting aspect of the thing and missing the broader economics. The major financial advantage of being married is increasing the complexity of the division of labor. You have combined households, appliances, etc, etc, and can divide out responsibilities in a manner that is more economically efficient than doing everything yourself, or even paying someone else to do some of it. Plus, you work for one another and provide your own… ahem… ‘entertainment,’ without cash transactions (which therefore are inherently untaxable.)
Probably the biggest potential disadvantage will be the way your spouse influences your behavior. Otherwise frugal behavior and prudent financial planning can be disrupted by a spendthrift spouse.
“Is Being Married always a Financial Advantage?”
Yes, if you are a woman married to a man, and he has more income or assets than you.
Men should be the ones pushing for a sexual equal rights amendment.
spouses are often responsible for each other’s debt.
Financially, this is one of the biggest disadvantages of being married. And, if you divorce because of the other’s financial irresponsibility, you’re still shafted.
Then, as daveinga says, in divorce, a man especially, screwed in many other ways also. I’ve made the choice to forgo re-marrying. The financial concerns are a large part of that decision. Paying a little extra in income tax is more than offset by having complete control and full ownership of my assets, which, except what is due the government, I will pass on to my children and no one else.
Helen, one of the first first things I wrote for PJ was an evaluation of how much it would cost using conventional partnership law, estate law, and so on, to let gay couples get the practical legal advantages of marriage. Put together wills and durable powers of attorney. joint ownership with rights of survivorship, and so on, and it was in the order of tens of thousands of dollars, plus thousands of dollars per year in sort of legal maintenance. The article has become inaccessible so I can’t find the totals right now, but I suspect the added costs involved there weight the total pretty heavily even with marriage penalty and all.
Marriage has ALWAYS been more financially advantageous for women. In fact, I would argue that the whole reason marriage was invented was to facilitate female parasitism on one individual man rather than her family or society in general. Current divorce laws and anti-male bias only multiply the disadvantage to men that has always been there.
The best personal, and financial, option for men is to stay single. If you really want to be married or have children, save up your money, learn a foreign language, and move to a non female supremacist country. Marriage will still be female parasitism but at least men have more protections.
Marriage was also created for the woman to be faithful and obedient to her husband. Disorder has arisen in our society because people have been receiving the perks of marriage without the responsibility. This comes in many forms: the divorce laws have already been mentioned; ready access to sex outside of marriage has the same effect on men that the divorce laws have on women; contraception and abortion disconnect the marital act from procreation, and thus sever the marital bond from the responsibility of child-rearing.
I empathize with where you’re coming from, and I personally practice abstinence. But premarital sex is not a comparable situation to female supremacy in the court system. Marriage is a legal, financial and social contract (some would also say religious contract) and the damage caused by unilaterally breaking this contract is much farther-reaching than premarital sex. That’s not to say I think premarital sex is good. I don’t.
What do you mean by “ALWAYS” – true in every culture throughout human history, every current culture, historically true in western cultures, always currently true in western cultures? Your initial statement (and, indeed, your entire post is so sweeping) that it is completely ridiculous. Furthermore, using the word “parasitism” implies that the husband gains no benefit. The benefit gained by the husband may be insufficient by your (or my) standards, but we’re not the ones making the deal.
I view all human sexual intercourse as prostitution and like all buyer-seller relationships, it is essentially adversarial. I view marriage, in western culture, as essentially a breeding contract, where the man promises to stick around and provide resources to the woman’s children and the woman promises that those children will be his biological offspring. I think that probably over 95% of Americans would agree that is the definition of marriage or at least a very important part of the agreement.
(There are/have been matriarchal and matrilocal cultures where paternity is not guaranteed. In these culture, the primary provisioner of a woman’s children is not her husband but rather her maternal brother(s). In these cultures, “marriage” means “guaranteed sexual access to a woman of breeding age”.)
The problem with marriage in the American Feminazi Police State is the man’s obligations under the above agreement are strongly enforced whereas the woman’s are even enforceable. So, ultimately, I agree with you. Marriage in the U.S. is rarely if ever a good idea for men. I would go even further and say that marriage should be completely abolished and replaced with a contract between the people themselves.
A lot of really good points here.
I am probably oversimplifying to define all marriage as parasitism. I agree that in many cases it has functioned as a mutually-agreed upon contract to provide mutual benefit from division of labor.
I still regard it as an inherently parasitic contract because in history, examples of husband suffering and dying for the benefit of the wife are like 100,000 to 1, if not even more disproportionate. Even if you figure in women who died from childbirth, it is men who make up the vast majority of spouses who are expected to suffer and die for the wife.
Even if we look at marriage in the most positive way possible, it is still a social mechanism which restrains male choices, resources, and power for the benefit of the female. Married fathers are even found to have lower testosterone than single men.
Marriage primarily benefits the offspring, not the woman.
Wrong! When it comes to paternity fraud, marriage gives women options and imposes obligations on men. (The sentence in the last paragraph of my previous post should have read “…whereas the woman’s aren’t even enforceable.”) If you women were so interested in equality and justice in this matter, you would have gotten the laws changed 20 years ago. I’m not seeing women trying to do that, except maybe Helen. Instead, women demand to be trusted, then continue to vote for politicians that make sure women are well paid and well protected when you lie. Essentially, you force men to attack you, then complain about a “War on Women”.
Absolutely wrong. Women enjoy unfettered access to the resources accumulated by her husband, and enjoy an entire network of laws, regulations, governmental and private organizations that will help her maintain the upper hand at all times in the marriage. All which are unavailable to the man.
Children do not even benefit as much from marriage as women, especially considering the heartless women who use their children as tools in divorce proceedings.
Wow, such bitterness! As much as I agree with both your points, I think your generalizations are unfair. “You women”? Really? What have I ever done but respond to your posts? Besides, how do you know how I vote and how trustworthy I am?
As the single mother of 2 children, it has been my experience that my marriage protected my children in countless ways.
As to the “War on Women”, I agree there is no war on women in this country, although worldwide the real war on women is being enforced through Sharia and enforced population control, but that’s a story for another day. In this country, fathers are being denied their rights in astonishing ways. Marriage may be the only way a father can guarantee he has any access to his kids, unless he has an ex-wife like me who would never dream of denying my kids access to their dad.
My God. You wouldn’t happen to be an attorney, by chance?
I think that one of the things we can see since those nascent days of the 1960s is a general coarsening of behavior and a willingness to discard commitments, courtesy, faith, manners, and notions of responsibility. We are now living those results.
I cannot fathom how moving yet further away by just having the parties enter into a mere contractual agreement is going to solve anything but further this insanity. Can anyone say, today, that marriage as an oath is in better shape now than 60 years ago?
One pillar of any society, Christian or faith-based or not, is the stability of the family unit. By enshrining this only in the law…well, we can see the result of this in most other areas where only legislative fiat stands between us and the barbarians at the gate. Barbarians ignore law.
As a single male who’s been passed over for jobs — let alone promotions when I managed to land a job — in corporate America specifically because of my relationship status, I’d have to argue that the financial *disadvantages* of not being married are enough to make marriage into an advantageous state if it wasn’t already.
The companies that passed you over probably did you a favor in the long run. Any company that would pass someone up merely due to their marital status is not a good company to work for.
I am really pretty sure that, even in community property states, you don’t automatically owe all your spouse’s debts if you don’t sign for them. Even if the law does say that, I think you can challenge it. I’d like to see an example of where a spouse was legally forced to pay any debt they didn’t sign for. No co0signing, no joint mortgage, nothing, just out of the blue.
Correct. Unless you are a co-signer on each account you are not liable for your spouses debt.
Wrong again! Part of my divorce settlement was having to take part of my ex’s $20,000 in bad student loans. The alternative to that was a long drawn out process and me living in penury.
“Even your body is no longer yours after marrying.” Of course not, why would you think it would be otherwise? It’s in the Bible for crying out loud! The husband’s reproductive system belongs to his wife, and the wife’s reproductive system belongs to her husband.
Except Roe v. Wade (among other things) overrides the Bible, at least as far as the wife’s reproductive system is concerned.
Exactly. Roe V. Wade shifted the power completely away from men and was the first step in the short walk toward replacing fathers with the state.
You don’t know how silly you sound to a non-religious person.
If I make a point and claim that it’s in the Koran, so it’s obvious you have to agree, would you care a whit?
No.
By the way, are you also following all of the commandments in Leviticus? ‘Cuz there’s really lots of stuff to obey there.
I never get an answer to that one from hard-core religious people.
Well, myth buster, when I got a vasectomy after 3 kids, my wife had to approve. When our good friend’s wife got her tubes tied, he wasn’t. Not a problem because they had discussed it.
Her body, her choice; remember?
As a little background, do you know what Suze majored in in college? Social work. She has no real training as a financial person.
In the mid-2000s, she was pushing home ownership with all her might. Do it anyway you can sez Suze. The bubble started bursting in 2008 or so, and many people who had followed her advice were now heavily underwater and being foreclosed upon.
She has since done a complete about-face. Now she is kind of against home ownership (maybe right at the point where you could get some bargains). That’s just one example of her advice among far too many examples of her crap. She is not just wrong, she is catastrophically, face-planting wrong. Bankrupt you wrong.
But she’s a millionaire. By following her own advice? Nope. Because she has a huge following of women who apparently don’t care if she is right or wrong. The money just pours in, whether she can manage it or not.
I see people like her and think that the American public gets what it deserves.
I’m disabled. When my wife and I got married, the government started deducting from my monthly SSI (Supplemental Security Income)check, if she made over $600 a month. My SSI ended completely if her monthly income reached $1550. I’ve now been ineligible for SSI since 2002. But if we’d simply “live together”, she could make $100,000 (or whatever amount) a week and they wouldn’t touch my SSI.
I’m surprised that no one has yet mentioned closet space!
Being married seemed to have helped the pocketbooks of people like Heather Mills and Ivanna Trump. Not so much the chump who is paying alimony and who turned over half his earnings to a sit-at-home spouse.
I guess marriage is financially good for whoever enjoys a net transfer of money in (her) direction.
The huge, laughable and ridiculous fiction in marriage is that each partner makes an equal contribution to the marriage.
Greetings:
I would have to go with the “No!”. As my first wife explained to me, “You’re money is our money. My money is my money.”
heh, you always think you are the only one to hear such things, until you discover you aren’t alone…
AND? you said first wife. you walked off the short plank again?!?
See chapter 6 (“Choice of Spouse”) in this book:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Millionaire-Mind-Thomas-Stanley/dp/0740718584/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1341247052&sr=8-1&keywords=stanley+millionaire+mind
There’s no such thing as a sure thing, and “past performance is no indicator of future gains” – but find a woman that fits those parameters, and chances are good you will be enriched both materially and emotionally. Find one that falls outside those parameters, and risks of all sorts rise exponentially.
The problem today is that there are so few of such women to be found, and too many princesses (http://pjmedia.com/drhelen/2012/06/29/how-to-live-like-a-king-in-a-world-full-of-princesses/) stand in the way of finding them.
Well, it depends on who you marry. My ex was financially unfaithful (among many other forms of unfaithfulness) and ran up a LOT of debt in the years before she filed for divorce. Guess who got to pay it? But six years later even with that 1K a month “divorce tax” (support for our last minor child that she tries to keep as far away from me as possible) and the remaining payments on the debt restructuring I’m better off now in almost every way than I was when married. I’m glad I have three terrific kids, but I’m also glad that she’s now someone else’s problem. Oh, yes, she’s doing the same things to him that she did to me and he already has the thousand-yard stare. And he’s stuck with her, too, as they just had a baby. I LOL every time I see them together.
The three chief benefits for a man in marriage are children, emotional support, and physical pleasure. I have the kids, never got much in the way of emotional support, and find that physical pleasure is pretty easy to come by. Guys, if you don’t want children, don’t marry.
All good points. Since women have commoditized themselves, physical pleasure is easy to come by. But men need to remember that women (and children) are expensive in a lot of way (not just through divorce). Women want things. Houses, cars, diamond rings, “proof that you love her”, etc. They want children. Recent estimates are up to a quarter of a million dollars to raise one child through age 18. Then there is college. Being single, despite tax penalties, etc., you can save a ton of money and live well in your retirement in a sunny clime away from grasping females and the taxman.
From someone in the business, Suze Orman is to financial advising as Joyce Brothers is to psychology and Ted Kennedy was to integrity.
I have heard her give poor advice before. Most often what I have heard is not inaccurate but incomplete advice from which she draws a conclusion. As but one example she has said that it is ALWAYS better to pay off one’s mortgage quickly rather than to continue the debt; she ignores other mitigating factors that should enter the decision making process. One of the first things one learns in this business is that “Always” and “Never” are usually not wise stands to take.
IMO Suze wants to be a wealthy celebrity and simply uses the financial advising industry as the vehicle to get there.
TG (Above #11)
In all fairness, to say that Suze Orman has no financial training is not completely accurate. She may not have majored in economics or finance in college, but she does hold Certified Financial Planner(R) status. She does have some training.
I pretty much agree with the remainder of you comment though; I missed it the first time around.
The vasectomy permission issue has a lot of folklore about it. I looked into the matter some time back and found that these claims of laws requiring it are BS. Lots of misinformation abounds. Only a few states and Canadian provinces ever had any such legal requirement, and these had eroded because of the analogy with a woman not having to get her husband’s permission for an abortion.
Georgia is one example of a state often cited for “still” having a law requiring spousal permission for sterilization, but the reality is that the state supreme court ruled the law unconstitutional on the mentioned grounds. That raises questions about the other states claimed to have such a law.
The federal HIPAA law passed some years ago contains stringent medical privacy provisions that override any state laws. HIPAA has no spousal exceptions for overriding a desired procedure. A man or woman cannot be required to get a spouse’s permission for sterilization because of HIPAA.
It appears, however, that some doctors and clinics either (erroneously or, I think, purposely) misinform patients about this being a legal requirement—or simply don’t want to sterilize one spouse without the other one knowing about it. HIPAA makes this illegal, and doctors and clinics should be confronted about the permission nonsense. Believe it or not, there seem to be more anecdotes about wives having to get a husband’s signature for a tubal ligation or other sterilization procedure than there are about husbands needing the wife’s permission for a vasectomy. Many online forums have accounts of doctors simply telling women (married or unmarried) who want a ligation, “You’ll change your mind,” and declining to arrange one.
It’s not just a man’s issue, and as noted, the idea of a “legal” requirement is pure fiction. The exact opposite is true. I’d suggest, though, that if one spouse wants to be sterilized behind the other’s back, that marriage has some real issues that need to be addressed. Sooner, not later…
Presumptive paternity is the greatest financial risk and the deal killer in the marriage contract. It amounts to agreeing to paying 20% of every paycheck for 18 years for a child or children you did not conceive. And the consequent costs of divorce and the risk is even higher, but you’re still stuck with paying child support.
The marriage contract dates back English common law in the Middle Ages. Presumptive paternity was adopted in the 14th century during the Age of Chivalry and the Cult of Mary. But back then divorce was not allowed and the penalty for adultery was severe–castration for the man and banishment for the woman.
Other parts of the contract, such as abortion on demand and no fault divorce, didn’t come about until the late 20th century, but they are no less onerous.
The bottom line is this. The marriage contract, as currently constructed, is designed to protect women from men. There is no law to protect men from women, who are often more predatory than most want to admit.
Under the terms and conditions of the current contract, a woman is perfectly free to abort her husband’s child, go out and get knocked up by some boy in a bar, divorce her husband for any reason or no reason–she is entitled to 50% of his income and assets over the duration of the “marriage” and the house–have her boyfriend move in so they can raise their love child together at her ex-husband’s expense. All without penalty–she has broken no law. In fact, she will most likely be praised for such betrayal and abandoment. Way to go, girl!
Why any man today would agree to that is beyond my ability to comprehend.
I’ll tell you how good marriage is for lots of women:
Are you a gung-ho mid-20s guy who just got his degree in something good and are going to become rich in life?
The reality is that you are going to work for 40 years and you will never be as rich – you won’t even get in the league of – women who have never worked in their lives. They watch The View and Dr Phil, do lunch and meander through the mall looking for stuff to buy. They get their money through men, and that’s the real setup in life.
And this is somehow twisted around to be oppression of women. These ball-busting women have got the ultimate scam going on over gullible, naive working men.
So get working Big Guy – you have to pay for a woman on your level (who will be a lot richer than some guy below you). I know that YOU will never get divorced, but guys like you – who never saw it coming – are going to be working hard and paying a good chunk over to a woman. She has a life of luxury and you work. And men are STILL buying this crap about oppression of women. You get what you deserve.
Nobody’s forcing men to act this stupid. As usual, men are responsible, meaning, men could shut this crap down in a heartbeat if they wanted to. After all, we do run the world, thank God.