When It Comes to Marriage and Money, Opposites Attract
Spouses reshape each others’ financial behaviour, for richer and poorer, marriage research suggests
3 min
The person you marry will often change your relationship to money.
We tend to choose our partners based on shared values, in-common traits and other similarities, marriage researchers say. But money-management styles are one case in which opposites do attract, said Jenny Olson, an assistant professor of marketing at Indiana University who studies couples’ financial decision-making.
We are drawn to people who can check and balance our own rigid rules about money, Prof. Olson said. Someone who feels they are too focused on saving and not focused enough on using money to enjoy life might look for a partner who can help them feel more comfortable with an occasional splurge.
Over the decades, however, spouses often grow more alike. The spendthrifts married to the tightwads manage to find some middle ground, learning from one another in the process, said Scott Rick, a marketing professor at the University of Michigan whose studies marital finances.
“The spouses who don’t converge have a harder time and those marriages are probably more fragile and could end in divorce,” Prof. Rick said, referencing his analysis of 1,303 couples, which will be published in a forthcoming book.
This mutual influence along with the built-in financial accountability couples get when they pool their assets are partly why married couples have a financial advantage over their single counterparts, researchers say. The median net worth of married couples 25 to 34 years old was nearly nine times as much as the median net worth of single households in 2019, up from four times as much in 2010, according to research from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
When Kristen James, a 33-year-old product manager in Austin, Texas, first started dating her now-husband, Ben, a 35-year-old startup co-founder, she noticed they came to the relationship with different approaches to their finances. Mr. James considered himself much more of a financial risk-taker; Ms. James preferred to manage her money more conservatively.
Instead of their differences erupting in conflict, Ms. James said her husband’s approach had a positive influence. After talking it over as a couple, Ms. James made the leap to change her career, moving into the technology industry and ultimately earning a higher salary as a result. Without her husband’s encouragement, she said she wouldn’t have felt secure making such a huge life change.
“He said, ‘You’re worth far more than what you’re making,’ and he pushed me to take on more risk and challenge myself in different ways,” she said.
Couples who communicate about the differences in their financial beliefs are better able to make decisions together, as tedious as that practice may initially feel, said Matt Lundquist, a psychotherapist and the clinical director of Tribeca Therapy, a psychotherapy practice based in New York.
He points to clients who take a regular weekend trip and have made it a habit to use the driving time to discuss their finances. While the children snooze in the back of the car, the parents review the state of their budgets and check in on progress toward longer-term goals.
Talking as a pair also prevents an imbalance of power in which one partner appoints themselves money manager, said Adrian Ward, a marketing professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
In his own research looking at how couples manage their money, Prof. Ward found that one partner often takes charge of the finances, not because they’re better equipped to do so, but because they have more time for the job. The in-house money manager—whom Prof. Ward calls “the household CFO”—often shuts the other partner out of the decision-making. Sometimes, the other person is relieved, but over time, that partner’s financial literacy suffers.
“Even though it’s hard to make decisions together and we’re both busy, and it would be way easier for one of us to just do it, it’s the best long-term way to care for each other,” he said.
Marcella Mollon-Williams, a behavioural financial adviser based in Bowie, Md., runs a premarital financial counselling session for couples.
The main issue she sees early on in relationships: Couples too often talk about the things one partner wants the other to avoid doing with their money, as opposed to the things they want to do together.
“Talk about the desires money brings, the things you want to accomplish,” she said. “When you start dreaming together, identifying the things money can buy, it’ll become easier. It’s sort of looking ahead and then working backwards.”
To stay on the same page financially, Kristen and Ben James set a monthly family finance meeting. Talking about their goals, reviewing financial allocations and having time to connect on those topics helps them keep their sights trained on the bigger picture, Ms. James said.
When she’s tempted to scroll through Redfin real-estate listings, she relies on her husband to hold her accountable.
“We have each other to say ‘We’re not buying a new house right now’ or ‘We’re not buying a new car right now’—you have that other person to ground you,” she said.
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JPMorgan Chase has a ‘strong bias’ against adding staff, while Walmart is keeping its head count flat. Major employers are in a new, ultra lean era.
3 min
It’s the corporate gamble of the moment: Can you run a company, increasing sales and juicing profits, without adding people?
American employers are increasingly making the calculation that they can keep the size of their teams flat—or shrink through layoffs—without harming their businesses.
Part of that thinking is the belief that artificial intelligence will be used to pick up some of the slack and automate more processes. Companies are also hesitant to make any moves in an economy many still describe as uncertain.
JPMorgan Chase’s chief financial officer told investors recently that the bank now has a “very strong bias against having the reflective response” to hire more people for any given need. Aerospace and defense company RTX boasted last week that its sales rose even without adding employees.
Goldman Sachs , meanwhile, sent a memo to staffers this month saying the firm “will constrain head count growth through the end of the year” and reduce roles that could be more efficient with AI. Walmart , the nation’s largest private employer, also said it plans to keep its head count roughly flat over the next three years, even as its sales grow.
“If people are getting more productive, you don’t need to hire more people,” Brian Chesky , Airbnb’s chief executive, said in an interview. “I see a lot of companies pre-emptively holding the line, forecasting and hoping that they can have smaller workforces.”
Airbnb employs around 7,000 people, and Chesky says he doesn’t expect that number to grow much over the next year. With the help of AI, he said he hopes that “the team we already have can get considerably more work done.”
Many companies seem intent on embracing a new, ultralean model of staffing, one where more roles are kept unfilled and hiring is treated as a last resort. At Intuit , every time a job comes open, managers are pushed to justify why they need to backfill it, said Sandeep Aujla , the company’s chief financial officer. The new rigor around hiring helps combat corporate bloat.
“That typical behavior that settles in—and we’re all guilty of it—is, historically, if someone leaves, if Jane Doe leaves, I’ve got to backfill Jane,” Aujla said in an interview. Now, when someone quits, the company asks: “Is there an opportunity for us to rethink how we staff?”
Intuit has chosen not to replace certain roles in its finance, legal and customer-support functions, he said. In its last fiscal year, the company’s revenue rose 16% even as its head count stayed flat, and it is planning only modest hiring in the current year.
The desire to avoid hiring or filling jobs reflects a growing push among executives to see a return on their AI spending. On earnings calls, mentions of ROI and AI investments are increasing, according to an analysis by AlphaSense, reflecting heightened interest from analysts and investors that companies make good on the millions they are pouring into AI.
Many executives hope that software coding assistants and armies of digital agents will keep improving—even if the current results still at times leave something to be desired.
The widespread caution in hiring now is frustrating job seekers and leading many employees within organizations to feel stuck in place, unable to ascend or take on new roles, workers and bosses say.
Inside many large companies, HR chiefs also say it is becoming increasingly difficult to predict just how many employees will be needed as technology takes on more of the work.
Some employers seem to think that fewer employees will actually improve operations.
Meta Platforms this past week said it is cutting 600 jobs in its AI division, a move some leaders hailed as a way to cut down on bureaucracy.
“By reducing the size of our team, fewer conversations will be required to make a decision, and each person will be more load-bearing and have more scope and impact,” Alexandr Wang , Meta’s chief AI officer, wrote in a memo to staff seen by The Wall Street Journal.
Though layoffs haven’t been widespread through the economy, some companies are making cuts. Target on Thursday said it would cut about 1,000 corporate employees, and close another 800 open positions, totaling around 8% of its corporate workforce. Michael Fiddelke , Target’s incoming CEO, said in a memo sent to staff that too “many layers and overlapping work have slowed decisions, making it harder to bring ideas to life.”
A range of other employers, from the electric-truck maker Rivian to cable and broadband provider Charter Communications , have announced their own staff cuts in recent weeks, too.
Operating with fewer people can still pose risks for companies by straining existing staffers or hurting efforts to develop future leaders, executives and economists say. “It’s a bit of a double-edged sword,” said Matthew Martin , senior U.S. economist at Oxford Economics. “You want to keep your head count costs down now—but you also have to have an eye on the future.”
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