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2009-07-29 06:18:42
By Kristina Cooke Kristina Cooke Tue Jul 28, 10:51 am ET
NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) Frustrated by your spouse's spending habits?
It might be why you married them, according to a working paper titled "Fatal
(Fiscal) Attraction" by professors of the Wharton School of Finance and
Northwestern University.
"Surveys of married adults suggest that opposites attract when it comes to
emotional reactions toward spending," Wharton's Scott Rick and Deborah Small
and Northwestern's Eli Finkel said in the paper.
They found that people who generally spend less than they would ideally like to
spend, and those who spend more than they would like to tend to marry each
other.
George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon
University, in a separate study called "Tightwads and Spendthrifts" published
last year, found that the degree people feel of a "pain of paying" determines
if they are a "tightwad" or a "spendthrift."
Loewenstein's study, conducted with Wharton's Rick and Carnegie Mellon doctoral
student Cynthia Cryder, found that the extent to which people said they found a
pain of paying strongly predicted their savings and credit card debt, but were
unrelated to income.
That could be a reason why these opposites attract, Rick, Small and Finkel
wrote. Those who find it painful to spend, for example, may dislike that
characteristic in themselves, and so are attracted to people who are more
liberal in their approach to money.
That's even though most single people say they would be happiest marrying
someone with similar spending habits to their own.
"The disconnect between what people say they look for in an ideal mate and the
characteristics of actual mates to whom they are attracted is unfortunate,"
Rick, Small and Finkel wrote, as the different spending habits often result in
greater financial conflict in marriage.
It is also unlikely that people will change from being a big spender to being a
big saver or vice versa, said Loewenstein.
"We have been looking for any reason in people's pasts that could make them
into a tightwad or a spendthrift," he said in an interview. "We haven't found
it yet. Perhaps it is genetic."
(Reporting by Kristina Cooke; editing by Patricia Reaney)