Young Married Women are Taking Charge of the Finances
FindLaw.com, a legal information website, conducted a national survey that found that married women between the ages of 18 and 34 were the most likely - among married men and women of all ages - to manage the household finances, and to do it without fighting.
Photo by Chicago Magazine
Thirty-seven percent of young married women say they handle all the household finances, compared with only 30 percent of young married men, and on their list of things that annoy them about their marriages, younger women rank their spouse’s bad habits and child rearing over money issues.
Also, apparently most younger women know the details of their spouse’s finances (net worth, income, debts, retirement savings and credit score) before getting married, but more than half of younger men don’t know the details of their wife’s finances before getting married.
It will be interesting to see how an increasing number of women in charge of household finances might affect children. According to a recent New York Times Magazine article by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn about why women are the best hope for fighting global poverty:
A series of studies has found that when women hold assets or gain incomes, family money is more likely to be spent on nutrition, medicine and housing [rather than alcohol and tobacco], and consequently children are healthier.
Perhaps a similar gender difference in household spending exists in the first world.
