Can Marriage Improve Your Finances?
BOSTON (CBS) - Although marriage is supposed to be about love, it can also have an impact on your financial well-being.
Over the last 50 years, the marriage rate among adult Americans has dropped by 20-percent.
That might be unfortunate when you consider married couples typically have twice the money in the bank as unmarried couples.
WBZ-TV's Paula Ebben reports.
Kristen Harad, a financial advisor, said, "The attitude of what's mine is mine, and what's yours is yours, now becomes, let's create our financial future."
By leveraging their combined assets and incomes, married couples can reach goals that might be impossible individually, such as going back to school or starting a business.
Another consideration is income.
A married man on average earns about 30-percent more than a single guy. One theory is husbands have fewer distractions and develop a stronger work ethic.
Marriage also carries other perks, such as health care coverage, lower auto insurance rates, and lesser known tax breaks like a spousal IRA.
Harad explained, "A spousal IRA contribution is simply when one spouse isn't working or earning income and the other spouse is, so the working spouse can contribute $5,000 to an IRA for his or her spouse."
Those Americans who do get married are doing it a little later in life.
The average age is just under 27 for men, and 25 for women.
