Did you ever realize that marriage used to be all about what you gave and what you got in return? That’s right, they don’t call it a marriage contract for no reason. Marriage was always a real business arrangement. It’s only over the past couple of hundred years that marriage has managed to make the transition to being about something far more intangible – about romance and love. Still, the transition isn’t all that complete. Get married today, and not only do you earn the lifelong devotion of your partner, you also come by a definite share of their wealth or their debt. Did you realize that there have been studies done into what marriage does to your wealth as opposed to what it would have been if you and the other person had remained single? As far as the study went, they found that people tripled their assets by marrying. There is a piece of marriage advice for you – get married and become rich.

There’s at least one part of this piece of marriage advice that’s easy to explain – when you have two people living together under the same roof, they have the benefits of scale working for them. They no longer have to rent two houses; grocery shopping becomes cheaper when you buy for a family as opposed to two single people; purchases like insurance of all kinds become a lot cheaper when you just need to add a second person to a plan. And then of course, when you’re married, you have a lot more time – division of labor. You only have to cook half as often, do the laundry half as often; your heating bill, your electricity bill and everything else becomes half of what it would be if you were single.

And how about the benefits you get come tax day? If you’re married, you get to file your taxes jointly. If you have vastly different incomes, you pay far less as a married couple than you would if you filed together. That’s the way the tax law works. The more money you make as a couple, the more slowly your tax rate climbs. Retirement planning becomes far easier and with better options to. A stay-at-home spouse for instance, gets to do a joint filing and to fund a spousal IRA. And spouses can inherit retirement assets to under the IRA. If both spouses have Roth IRAs, the surviving one can inherit the other’s account and roll it into theirs.

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The final piece of marriage advice you get to do with the actual financial benefits coming your way getting married, has to do with updating your beneficiary information on your retirement account. The retirement account is probably the biggest asset anyone
ever gets to own in their lifetime. What they need to do is make sure that they update the beneficiary information attached to their retirement accounts. Not doing that can really put that pot of money at risk. And updating that information works both ways. If you do get divorced, make sure that you remove the name of your ex off that retirement account. You don’t want to be sending your entire retirement account to a disliked ex-spouse, now do you?